Muskblog: Homesteading the Internet since 1995

I just got the same email, from “Gloria OHal”. I agree with you, in that I am surprised they were able to use a hilton.com address.

I got the same email from Julie Johnson, using a hilton.com address.

This was sent to me:

This is to notify you that you have been chosen as one of the beneficiary of a Grant Donation for humanitarian and your personal development. You have been granted the sum of $4,000,000.00 USD as developmental aid from the UN Foundation. For more details contact Mr. Barry Gibson (Executive Secretary) with this email: mr.barrygibson@rogers.com

This transmission is not a digital or electronic signature and cannot be used to form, document, or authenticate a contract. Hilton and its affiliates accept no liability arising in connection with this transmission.Copyright 2012 Hilton Worldwide Proprietary and Confidential

I got the same email……

This is not the work of Hilton or Rogers. Sometimes one person can do something really stupid and it results in a lot of people getting spammed. Someone in my hockeypool got his computer infected with something and it generated so much spam sent to our private hockeypool mailing address, an address no one outside the hockeypool knew existed.

I used to try and report every spam I received to SpamCop, that is way too much work. It might surprise you but Microsoft and some other big industry players have done a better job at fighting spam than in the olden days. I get a lot of spam from Japan. I was also told by Baidu staff that Chinese spammers are particularly clever, but the world spam champion is the Russians or states neighbouring Russia. They have spam celebrities, these men are wanted criminals, but they are also wealthy. There is a website devoted to the top 10 spammers just like the FBIs most wanted. A lot of the world’s spam is the result of a few tools written by a few mostly Russian computer programmers. If it makes you feel better some of them studied at MIT.

Individual computers such as probably some at Hilton get infected with bots. This happens from downloading stuff on the Internet, particularly with Microsoft Outlook. That one program is responsible for a lot of computer problems. It works better now, but it had so many exploits that Microsoft has to spend millions of dollars supporting a program they gave away for free. Macs are not immune to bots but the spammers and hackers target older not up to date Windows machines. They then get all the email addresses they can and try to infect all neighbouring computers. Once they have a bot net and a huge collection of email addresses they send out the spams.

This particular email seems like a phishing scam. The Russians generally are trying to get you to go to a particular website. These phishing scams are often run out of Nigeria. Nigeria is the world leader in ripping off gullible white people who speak English. Again the email can be reported but because there are so many scammers and they are usually teenagers operating out of cyber cafes in far away countries there is little local authorities can do. The Russian Spammers sell email address lists and write tools that enable less sophisticated people so called “script kiddies” to pretend they are clever and launch these spam bombardments. It only takes one or two people to fall for the scam to make the whole effort worthwhile.

So the best thing you can do is keep your computer up to date. Don’t open attachments from people you don’t know. Don’t pirate software. Don’t pirate movies or music. Don’t use those peer to peer sharing programs in general. Finally train your spam filters to keep this crap out of your inbox. It will result in some false positives but generally I get 100s of spams a day but only one or two I actually see such as this one.

Corporations and governments lose real money routing all this garbage they have to fight the war, individual victims can just make horror story blog postings. To stop the problem completely requires newer computers, better training, smarter humans, and capturing the individuals who write the tools that enable the mass spamming. Changing your email address is a solution some employ, but that is only a short term fix and you still have to contact all your contacts and implore them use your new email address. It is a very hit and miss strategy.