Everybody read this! Mike and moderators!

[L8sho2003]

Someone has started tapping in to our profiles here and is using our e-mail to spam us! If anyone recieves an e-mail from me, delete it. Member canadian heat recieved an e-mail with my name on it that was some sort of commercial mail that I don't have anything to do with! I recommend that everyone take their e-mail from their profile as I am now. If it looks wierd don't open it. Especially if it is from me. If this continues I will start a new name and profile. Be warned!

Edit 8:40 pm. : Unfortunately as members you can't delete your e-mail from your profile to prevent the problem mentioned above. Mike, please address this. If anybody receives mail from me, don't answer it, I don't e-mail you guys, ever...

[joes94yota]

We breifly talked about this earlier, I have had this problem for about 2 or 3 weeks now, I just ignore it. I reformated my hard drive, and my anti-virus would not install for some reason, and I am worried because the e-mails sometimes contain attachments, and I opened one, when I get my anti-virus installed someday, I wonder how many infected files I will have on my hard drive. I hope that Mike can figure out what is going on here, because I love this site, but don't want to turn away people because of this problem that some looser hacker who has no life has done to our site. If we find out who this is I say we find out were he lives and drive over his car with our trucks. (JK)

[L8sho2003]

Sorry, didn't know it had been discussed. It's not a viral thing, they are getting our e-mail addresses from this board. Unless they hacked the server, we need to have our personal e-mail not listed publicly. It takes effort, but not a lot of brains to look at you profile and get your address. Keep in mind, a skilled asshole can automate the process nowadays.

[joes94yota]

We talked about it but some one said it was no big deal and told us to forget about it

[L8sho2003]

Someone (mentioned in above quote) isn't the network nerd for a company like I am. I jeopardize alot when I introduce a liability like this. I will enter as a guest if it continues. I would probably be more tolerable as a mute(guest) anyway! ;D

I got it figured out. I opened a new e-mail called [e-mail] and used it in my profile. Hopefully nobody is stupid enough to open an e-mail from "badassvirus38"! And, I know this didn't take a genius to figure out, but give me some credit, I did drink a couple beers before I got to work tonight!

[Mike Kelly]

I will check with the ProBoards techies, but you may have figured out that anytime you place your email addy on the net ANYWHERE (yes, even the most trusted of sites will sell your addy) you open yourself up for spam.

Since I have published my email addy here on this site, I literally get over 100 emails from 5:00pm til 8:00am EVERYDAY. Plus the other 50 or so that I get throughout the day.

I am the techie geek at a large company and field these questions every day from our loosers... oops, users. As L8show mentioned, hackers have perfected the art of automating email scavenging. You do have the option in your profile to not publish your email addy. Specifically, the option is "Hide email address from public" That is how i suggest you combat this issue. If you really want to publish your email address, take a look at my profile. I used an image to show my email. Automated programs can not "read" the text in an image. If you need help with this, PM me.

I would hate to see guys leave the site because of a few emails. Use common sense... do not open suspicious attachments even if they appear to be from someone you know. Viruses out today will "spoof" the from address in an email to make it appear as if they are from someone you know.

At any rate... I will check into this to see if it is a widespread issue on ProBoards, or an isolated incident. Please continue to post issues and updates to this topic in this thread.

Thank you,

[L8sho2003]

I'm not worried so much about anyone infiltrating my network, so much as using my identity to harm people here. I run pretty comprehensive diagnostics and prevention. Like mike said, beyond countermeasures, it's all in where you post your name. be smart! I'm not trying to start a panic, just trying to stop whoever is behind this by thinking together.

[Mike Kelly]

Guys, if you receive one of these messages, please forward it to me so that I can check it out and talk to the support folks. I need the full email, and if you can include the headers (if you don't know what that is, don't worry about it) it would help out.

Please use the subject - ToyotoaOffRoad.com - Possible Virus.

Otherwise, i will likely delete it as i won't recognize your email address.

thanks,

[DeadlyPeace]

:-XWith all the BS that has been going around in the internet world is the reason why I have a personal filter setup on my e-mail. Basically if the e-mail address isn't added to my filter list I'll never see it nor know it was ever sent. It automaticly gets deleted before it gets to my inbox.

[liftedtacoma99]

like joes94yota said if we find him, pay him a visit, and "talk things out"

[iluvdrt]

im not sure if thats what ive been getting or not. it will be someones name and it is always from @yahoo.com. my antivirus and email scanner will usually inform me if its nsomething that looks dangerous but none the less its scary. sometimes i will get them and it will be something like a 1 sentence question from someone i dont really know that is a member on the board. i will open it and reply, unless mr. norton says its its potentially dangerous.

[Hoodlum]

I got one with a virus attached to it. It said it was from Carlos4x4sand. thankfully our company has a very good system . IT COULD BE A JEALOUS JEEPER

[4xfred]

;D BikeGuy notified me a few days ago that he got an e-mail w/attatchments from me. These are not isolated cases by any means. Everybody needs to pay attention & be careful until we get this figured out. I know I've been contacting people thru e-mail about the upcoming trail ride. To those people, use the board or PM for now. Like L8 said, nobody wants to be the cause of others problems. Later...

[bikeguy18974]

My post about a virus is on the second page of this forum.

Since I posted it I have gotten more than 30 emails with that virus in it. I easily recognize at least 10 of the email addresses from the user names on this board. I don't even scan them anymore usually the are 35K in size and I know now whats inside. The emails always have different titles too.

L8 one was from you, or at least had your email address.

About a week ago I did as Mike said and hid my email adress from the public. I also edited my one post were I had my email adress posted, even though i tried the nospam trick.

I got three of these emails last night, so it doesn't seem to be working

I know its not the folks on the board doing it but i do believe it is somehow board related.

Just play it safe and scan or delete all suspicious emails.

[Mike Kelly]

Unfortunately, once your email is out there, they already have it and it is out there so you will likely keep getting them. But, if you have not gotten one yet, do the recommended safeguards and you should be ok.

[snorkleman]

Email Viruses suck and are a pain. I work for a company and we have a statewide email system for public schools. We see this kind of thing very very often. Mike is right on this. If your email is on the net somewhere then it can be captured by programs that search for strings that match email addresses in the text on the net. Never assume anything you put on the net is safe. This includes emails you send to people.

They then use those email addresses to "spoof" more emails with viruses. Spoofing is where you make it look like it is sent from the originating address but it isn't. This is common place on the internet. When possible, instead of using @ symbol, try using "at" (quotations included). The programs searching for email addy's are looking for the @ symbol. This can help.

Spoofed addresses will look normal but are just emails sent from a mail relay using the false address. Once your email address is captured, it will probably be used till that virus is quarantined by the general populus and no longer effective. It kinda goes in cycles.

Like everyone says...watch what emails you open. Only opening an email can be fine sometimes but NEVER NEVER open an attachment with them. If you see the dialog box for downloading a program always select NO unless you know what it is. It is the attachments that do the harm. They are the actual viruses.

Unfortunately there is no real solution to some of this and is basically the nature of the beast. You can keep it from getting out of control but people are always going to be looking for ways to compromise your security.