[PLUG] Spammer techniques question (fwd)

Don Buchholz don at truedisk.com
Thu Aug 1 20:47:05 UTC 2002


Rich Shepard wrote:
> 
> I cannot answer this question, sent by a friend of mine.
> Anyone here know the answer?
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Do you or any of your fellow PLUGgers know how a spammer
> could harvest e-mail addressees right off my server? I
> have a couple addresses I set up a while ago but have never
> used or published, yet some spammers seem to have discovered
> them. Can they actually read the /etc/passwd file to get
> lists of users? How else (assuming I haven't been totally
> hacked) could they get this info? Or are these just lucky
> guesses? ...

Is fingerd running?  (or configured in inetd?)

>      ... How can I tell them there's no one really there
> and that they are wasting their valuable time?
> 

You can't.  (But I'm sure Rich has already answered this one!)


- Don




More information about the PLUG mailing list