> From: Matt Okeson-Harlow [mailto:[email protected]] > > Have you contacted box.net about it? I started getting spam to an address > that I had only given to carbonite.com a while back. I hit up their support > email and got a response back a few weeks later that the company that they > outsourced thier email lists to had misused it. They apologized and said they > had dropped that provider as one of their vendors.
I got another reply from another user on this list, who referenced the following: http://community.box.com/boxnet/topics/after_joining_box_net_my_email_addres s_is_getting_spammed I replied with the following: I agree that box.net, like any other reputable company, isn't going to underhandedly disclose information like this to spammers. However, I've witnessed enough scenarios where some hackers implanted a virus into a GIF or a JPG or whatever at yahoo, or similar sites... I believe most likely, the *actual* cause of the problem here is... Either box.net as a whole, or some individuals in the company, or just one of their servers use hacked up laptops with viruses and junk in them. They think they have it under control (as most people do) but ... Last I knew, the antivirus/antimalware business was a $4b industry. And credit fraud/identity theft was a $40b industry. The job of the bad guys is to find any unknown or unfixed vulnerability, and exploit it. The job of the good guys is to prevent *every* such possible attack. The bad guys make their money by stealing from you, or stealing from somebody else on your behalf. The good guys must convince you to voluntarily pay them for protection before you get something bad. Most users think antivirus should be free (and consequently don't pay.) Most users run some kind of antivirus, but even after their antivirus fails them, they still just use antivirus and antimalware, thinking they'll be able to clean it out after the infestation. Long story short, the good guys are losing. And when the good guys are losing, the best strategy is to retreat. This means... Yes, you should run antivirus and stuff, but you should not rely on it. The only suitable defense is good backups. At the first sign of any virus or any junk on your computer, simply nuke the whole thing back to yesterday. It's the only strategy that works, but unfortunately, it only works if you prepared in advance. Which most people don't do. In the many, many times that I've helped somebody rid their computer of some kind of infestation... 99% of the time it's a failure. The bad guys are smarter, more motivated than the good guys. Even if you successfully clean it, they put hooks in that just immediately re-infest you. The discussion you referenced is dated seven months ago. In the last 7 months, they have had plenty of time to get their act straight. If they didn't do it yet, I don't believe they will ever be successful. Not because they don't care, but because they just don't know how. It represents a lot of work, to clean their systems, or they don't know how or which systems need to be cleaned. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
