3:03pm July 9, 2014

Bizarro phishing(?) emails make me cranky

feliscorvus:

I mostly ignore spam email (unless it’s unintentionally funny) and I am generally pretty good at recognizing ‘phishing’ attempts. But recently I got a string of exceedingly bizarre messages in my inbox that I am still not sure what to make of.

It *almost* seems like someone is trolling me, but the whole…vibe of it is oddly “automated”. Sort of like what you’d expect to get if you were being trolled by a robot that was only running at half-power.

All the messages in this “thread” I’ve gotten so far have been from disposable “anonymizer” addresses. As in, the ‘from’ field changes every time and it is never an address that you could conceivably reply to.

It isn’t coming from hacked accounts of people I know or anything, and it isn’t spoofing the ‘from’ address to look like it’s from my bank, etc. But what it IS doing is putting email addresses similar or identical to those of people in my contacts list into the *content* of the weird messages.

I have not been able to find anything online describing this form of spamming or phishing or whatever it is. But it’s incredibly annoying because somehow this crap keeps showing up in my main inbox rather than being shuffled into spam, and they keep switching anonymizer domains so I can’t filter/block them readily.

The reason this is all so disturbing is because the first couple messages I got seemed to be referring to things that were, at the very least, incredibly creepy and gross. E.g., lists of image links (which I did NOT click!) interspersed with disjointed discussion of putting spy cameras in locker rooms to film people changing.

The disjointed discussion in the first few messages I got seemed to be taking place between about 3-4 people referring to each other using nicknames. The nicknames would recur in later emails, associated with different disposable addresses, and once the “real” name of one of the ‘participants’ was also used.

I put “real” in quotes because the name being used was the name of someone in my email contacts, who I do actually know IRL.

Mind you, the IRL-person in question had absolutely no knowledge of this ‘thread’ until I told them about it and most assuredly had *not* added me to any sort of bizarro anonymous creepy-image-linking ring.

So either there is some funky algorithm thing pulling stuff from my contacts to create minimally coherent garbage messages and then sending them to me, or someone is making a really half-assed attempt to impersonate my friend. Or, alternately, someone hacked my friend’s account ages ago and is using tiny bits of their identity (first name, email address) to engage in shady picture-sharing, but my friend has seen nothing weird show up in their inbox, so I don’t know how they would do that.

…so, yeah, I don’t plan on devoting a lot of time or energy to this, but I figured I would mention it in case anyone might’ve experienced a similar thing. And before anyone suggests it, yes, I have changed passwords since this started and my friend just changed theirs as well. It’s just annoying as heck to not know for sure what is going on.

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