Daily Spam re Norton/Mcafee

[andypat]

So much spam getting through at mo , both my wife and I getting same spam, separate email addresses also  my mother is getting the same too.

Been going on a while now - anyone else getting them?

[chrisardy]

Hi Dan_M,

Perhaps you could explain exactly how marking the spam helps when absolutely nothing happens and 99% of emails put in spam by your filters are genuine emails?

Could you also explain exactly what you are doing to stop these getting through and when you expect to have stopped them?

Can you also explain why If you can stop me forwarding them to your CEO why you can't stop them coming through in the first place?

[Humblestrummer]

Looking back through the various threads I came across a post from DaveW96 who said he had discovered a line in the header common to all the various antivirus/bitcoin/soappods spam we are getting. The line is an apparently inaccurate date: Wed4 Oct 2020 18:44:07 -0400 which is indeed common to all this spam,  and indeed absent from the other routine spam I get from time to time.  It strongly suggests that despite the wide variety of domains, email addresses and IP addresses, this garbage does emanatre from a sngle source. I have set a filter with its own flag and will report progress.

[ALF28]

Mailuser

Thanks for advice and history of the virgin mail service, once part of gmail long ago. The email is a free add on and can be discontinued if not used but the password should be different to the virgin media account, so if the email is hacked they also have control of the account, my VM account user name is no longer the virgin email address for that reason but an outlook email address.

I am aware virgin only investigate virgin phishing, so me sending them some phishing spam was not viable but I though it might help.

I agree gmail as an alternative service works very well, I also use  outlook mail and get little or no spam over 4 years.

spam-PHISHING-& spoofed sender addresses

I have been getting  spam virgin email from sender addresses in my "own name" from gmail and outlook which puzzled and alarmed me, so I checked this out and found that the simple reason for this is that they hide their own email address (the spammer), so simply spoof a sender address that looks legitimate and could be one using your own name, so any replies and the return path may not go to the spammer but to the spoofed sender address which is logged in the collected address book.

FILTERS

My own filters now too complicated and not working properly at all today. So I will simplify things and and just whitelist my inbox and see if that works.

All other mail will go to spam and then I will forget about this nightmare.

alf28

[ALF28]

SPAM DEFINITION-

SEE    Spam / Threats / Kaspersky.antivirus.lv

Spam is usually anonymous-

The sender/hacker can often not be traced-so very dangerous, they often use a spoofed sender address that is just fake to hide their true identity and make them hard to trace or contact once they have delivered their payload of spam/scam/phishing email.

There are "free tools" on the internet  to send "anonymous fake spam emails" so easy to do this with any sender address.

spam-delete it do not click on it, or mark it as spam, may assist virgin to identify the spam in the future.

alf28

[stublee]

"spam-delete it do not click on it, or mark it as spam, may assist virgin to identify the spam in the future."

Well the issue is ...  considering how long the posts have been going on and the hundreds if not thousands of messages flagged as "Spam " - VM must have identified this particular Spam which has been emanating from the same source . Question is .............

WHAT ARE THEY DOING ABOUT IT ?

[JamieY]

This situation is certainly not getting any better.

I add every sender to blacklist, flag as spam and have created a filter for some of the sender or regular subjects ...

And it does nothing.

Every single one gets through, circa 14 a day...

[ALF28]

DATA BREACHES

Some virgin Email addresses must be on hacked lists posted on the dark web, spammers can use these list to target victims for spam.

There is are "recent flood" of posting with people getting huge amounts of spam every day. 

I have had the spam problem commenced in 2016 and never stopped since, but has reduced, used to get 10/20 a day but now reduced  to 3/4 per day.

Virgin do identify some spam but the spammers seem to have the upper hand and many get through.

From other postings virgin say they are aware of the spam problem and advise to mark dodgy emails as spam. 

I have seen some reduction in my "recent general spam"  since reporting all spam to action fraud and I paste in the full header data now.

I also report virgin related phishing to virgin but only a few, not regular.

I also get some specific spam that continues over years from the same spammers approx once per month and these are tagged spam usually.

I have had lots of fake supermarket, free samples, antivirus,bitcoin, blackmail, dating services, etc., and fake emails from my own past contacts going back 10/15 years- very odd.

In some cases hackers collect data on victims using social engineering methods to collect your data so try to trick you to open an email by pretending to be a known contact using spoofed sender addresses, so be careful.

If these type of concerning and worrying activities are happening best to use other emails and so the old email will then only get spam if you transfer your genuine contact to another email.

The hackers have at times had me very concerned and obvious at some stage my computer & mail accounts were  hacked and also websites such as myheritage, linkedin, facebook,  for example where hackers can get your data and  I had to recover the accounts-not always easy.

At times the hacker seems to have knowledge and data such as passwords that "only personal contacts/associates" could possibly know, so perhaps in some case " your contacts" have also been hacked and even "servers" that hold your data.

So easy to blame virgin, they did have a data leak and my own email is in many online hacked lists (9) and also recent pastes, but hacking can be via any account or social media where the email has been used, so the picture is complex.

Also some companies and web sites actually sell your data to other companies or share it with analytics companies without you knowing that.

If you enter your email address onto many  general web sites it will eventually become public.

My observation is that it is unlikely the spam problem will go away anytime soon as there are millions of spammers.

The resources to combat the spam are expensive using AI and need specialist companies to do this, not sure what service  virgin use.

Just be choosy which emails you decide to use for banking etc, wise to have some private un-spammed emails.

Hackers use other methods, such as phone, just had one now on my landline  while dong this post saying BT/offcom your ip address has been hacked please press 1 to continue, I do not even use BT???.    Amazing but worrying the hacking is both email and phone, it was a local phone number with my area code so probably a spoofed call via voip, they even know my location to use my area tel code.

alf28

I

[stublee]

All very well and true and  having been with NTL/ Virgin for 20 years using their e-mail addresses for both business and personal purposes have only recently experienced this abnormal amount of Spam .  Obviously the amount of Cr*p circulating is forever increasing and we have always to be on our guard etc. but as "Dave's solution " appears to be working in the majority of cases is it too much to ask VM to put similar measures in place to prevent the crud ever turning up in their customers's IN Boxes in the first place ?

[ALF28]

stublee

Thanks,Dave's solution is  interesting , I will add it to my filters, I was not aware of this thread.

My filters are  behaving odd lately with many glitches, perhaps to many filters, have removed some but will add dave's solution

I have now stopped whitelisting as it was not working properly and was not reliable.

I am now removing some contacts from my primary email and transferring to virgin secondary  email accounts so eventually only spam will go to the primary email.

I have 5  x secondary virgin emails  and  all get zero spam, although some members have stated they get spam on secondary emails, they can be easily removed and replaced with new emails if needed.

Thank for this tip.

alf28

[Saminthecity79]

This does not answer our questions. Why is this happening? Has there been a data breach? I know some people that are receiving these emails have NEVER given out their email address so that would suggest a data breach of some sort. Clearly nothing has been done by your 'background team' as we are all still getting the same type of emails in the same large numbers as we did when all this started. I am being ignored at every junction so I'm going to contact Martin Lewis, Watchdog, the national press and sing it from the rooftops that something sinister is going on here and you guys are doing nothing about it. Do the decent thing and acknowledge the problem and release an official statement. To think you've just raised all our prices just adds insult to injury... 😡