Email Identity Theft

[grsarcata]

I keep getting mailer daemons from addressed I have never sent email too. I think someone has stolen my business email address and is using it to send large amounts of spam. How can I defend against this?

[SDK]

Their nothing you can do. This is the Sobig Virus... Another use got the same problem... See Dangerous Emails-need Some Help Thread .

I just recommend that you update your anti-virus and run a scan to check if you're infect by SoBig.

So Big Work Like this

An Infected Computer with SoBig send an e-mail FAKING he's YOU! The Recipient anti-virus mail software see the e-mail and stop it before it's reach the recipient and send back a notice to you. But it's not you who send the e-mail, it's another computer who stealing in your identity.

I got one of co-worker to get an Out of Office Reply when he never sends an e-mail to that guy. After a quick check up, the Out of Office guy had received a virus attachment from the co-worker. But the e-mail trace was coming from US when normally; I should only go throw the Exchange server.

That Sobig... Its make user freaking out until they know Sobig steal/fake identity.

[White_Eskimo]

Yep, sounds like the Sobig virus. Dont download any of the attachments. Go and upgrade your anti-virus program immedietly. Also, check out this website for a little bit more info about the virus:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com...obig.f@mm.html

good luck

[mohaughn]

The MoFei virus does the same thing and has been around a lot longer.. Not as widespread as the SoBig virus is right now.


edit-- sorry, it is Klez, not Mofei..

[j3r]

Regular old spammers also steal people's email addresses and use them as the From: address on their spam messages. Every once in a while I'll get a bounce from hotmail from a spam message (that I obviously didn't send).
If your email address is on the web anywhere, or you've ever given it out to a business, you can pretty much assume that spammers have it. The more scrupulous ones send crap to it, the less scrupulous ones send mail from it. There is nothing you can do to stop this. Using GPG et al. can help, but not really.

[Nightfalls_Girl]

I had a simmler thing happoning to my Hotmail account, I just blocked all the email addys that I was receaving mailer deamons from and changed ALL my passwords.
What else could you possably do!!


Nightfalls_Girl

[Arken]

The same thing has been happening to me. I don't think it's the Sobig Virus. It's been happening for some time now. I have an updated Anti-Viral software installed, and just finished scanning for Viruses. None Found. I don't have the answer to what could be causing this, just that it's a pain just like getting spam. Delete the mail and deal with it I guess. Yes you could block the sender too, but since it already out there, I keep on getting email from different daemons. Oh well!!!

[grsarcata]

Upon further investigation, we have determined that some of our clients have been infected with SoBig. Since the virus crawls through their email addresses (one of which is ours) It then replicates and then uses our address (among others) to send itself out to others to infect more machines.

Apparently there is nothing we can do to stop it.

[SDK]

Install Anti-Virus, Update their Virus Definition and run them should stop SoBig...

[weddy]

See this article by Spyware Weekly. Wouldn't help out grsarcata much with this outbreak ...but it might help with future outbreaks if people turned off bouncing during big infections.