marketplace virus posting

[auditude at cox.net]

Hi Brett,

It's cool.  These bots must be pretty sophisticated tho' if there's no human intervention.  To post to the marketplace through the webpage, one has to click on two checkboxes and such.  To send an email to the markplace "list" via email, if that's even possible (I vaguely recall that it isn't), they would have to somehow sub and reply to the confirmation email.

So, it makes me think that people are actually taking the time to try to infect specific forums like the marketplace.  I just wonder why people do it.  Is it just to be mean or what?  I have heard that a root cause for viruses might ultimately be to harvest email addresses for spam.  

(By the way, why does it seem like it's difficult to detect spammers.  I mean, if the spam comes from a business that only makes money if you can find them to send it to, where's the mystery as to who's responsible for the spam?  If they are ignoring the business client of the spammer and trying to go after the spammer, then maybe they're (the anti-spam groups) going after the wrong folks.  I must be missing something about that.)

Looking at the email again now, it does look more generic than I thought it was initially, so it probably is just some automated thing.  Hmm, or not.

Maybe one of those funky "type the word you see in the box" images to prevent automated baddies from doing their thing would work.  But I've stuff about how those make it difficult for impaired folks to participate in those resources.  Altho' I guess if you are blind you might not necessarily be a car enthusiast or have car parts to sell.

This spam thing, and the virus thing too, have just gotten out of hand.  But I guess that's not news.  What does bug me is otherwise-intelligent people (friends, acquaintances, coworkers) who still forward stupid crap like chain letter type stuff.  Oooh, my virtual tongue hurts from biting it instead of lashing out against those no-harm-meaners!  "Get to know your friends", "Bill Gates is tracking these emails and will pay...", etc.

Cheers,

Ken
 
> From: Brett Dikeman <brett at cloud9.net>
> Date: 2004/04/11 Sun PM 10:09:10 EDT
> To: <auditude at cox.net>,  quattro at audifans.com
> Subject: Re: Re: marketplace virus posting
> 
> At 9:28 PM -0400 4/11/04, <auditude at cox.net> wrote:
> >Did I ask if it would infect my system(no)?  Did you answer any of 
> >my questions(no)?
> >Still wondering whether this stuff is from a person or a bot,
> 
> Sorry, in a snippy mood when I read the email, it was obnoxious. 
> However, I did answer your question very specifically:
> 
> >  This virus been out for months and well known to fake coming from
> >  "admin teams" at various domains.
> 
> Brett
> -- 
> "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
> safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/
>