How can spammers get your email address?
There are four main ways that spammers obtain their victims' email addresses:
- They illegally buy email address lists.
- They use "harvesting" programs that search the internet, such as Google Bots, and copy any text that contains the "@" character.
- They use "dictionary" (brute force) programs just like hackers do.
- You voluntarily and unconsciously provide your email address when you register or unsubscribe from online services.
The illegal purchase of email address lists
There are many people in key positions who can sell information they get from their work servers, for example. The lists can be sold on the black market or even on eBay. But in addition to legitimate employees of a company who can exploit their position, there are also hackers who steal customer lists and then sell them to spammers.
Harvesting programs, also known as crawl and scrape programs
These applications "patrol" the internet, and "capture" any text that contains the "@" character. Of course, they can collect thousands of addresses in just one hour.
Programs that use dictionaries or brute force programs
This is the third way to collect addresses to use for spam. Just like the programs used by hackers, they generate random combinations of letters and numbers from a dictionary and match them up as addresses. Of course, many of the results are inaccurate, but these programs can generate hundreds of thousands of addresses per hour, ensuring that at least some of them will be real.
Subscribe or unsubscribe to newsletter services
Let's not forget to mention that many users hand over their emails to spammers themselves. A very common tactic is to receive a newsletter from somewhere you never signed up for. We usually look for the "unsubscribe" button to be sure that we will not receive newsletters from them again. But this way you confirm that your email has a real person as the recipient.
What can I do about all this?
- Are you trying to hide your email from spammers?
- Disguise your email address using obfuscation
- Use a disposable email address
- Use an email address encoding tool if you want to publish it somewhere.
Avoid unsubscribing to newsletters you don't know the source of. Just delete the email.
If spammers do get your email address, they will add it to a list that feeds spamming software (“ratware”). You know what happens next, botnets will start bombarding your inbox with spam.
Source: secnews.gr
