SWOYT.com spam -- some progress last night
 

A very helpful guy from CECash contacted me last night -- we looked at the headers, I showed him all the emails that I had received to the email address in question that got hit with this SWOYT stuff... Everything looked to be in order.

The best possible scenario that they can come up with now is that maybe somebody accessed my stats on CECash and were able to get my email that way... but CECash has IP logs of all this -- which is pretty amazing if you ask me... we will see if anything turns up. So far it's a pretty boring problem, but you have to raise an eyebrow when this could happen again and honest people get blamed instead of the real instigators...

Fortunately this is an infrequent problem as far as webmaster emails go -- the only other thing that really upset me was somebody got my paypal email -- my guess is the HTML Paypal form on one of my sites was hit by a robot. Now I can't really block all that spam without losing my paypal account :1orglaugh

If Paypal was smart they would do some basic encryption of the email address for their submit forms -- otherwise everyone with a Paypal button will have a box full of trojan/worm attack...



:BangBang: ME

pete, bro...

cecash, platinumbucks/pornojunkies, and i think some other big names were mentioned....

let's get real here... i am not pointing fingers per se, but there's only 2 choices here, and the first one would be a shot in the dark as it would be hard to hack more than 1 big guy (if any at all)

a) the lists were sold by the companies, or rogue employees (lol), or the companies are in on the whole site

b) some punk hacked all of the big guys and stol their lists

Yes all that is possible. I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt as much as I can... especially when somebody's reputation for keeping a clean list is at stake -- and they seem helpful in wanting to resolve the problem -- and also they have taken prudent security measures... I don't see CECash being sloppy on this -- they seem very top of who has access to my email address. Again it's not a big issue... but it raises some eyebrows :)

Just for the record I really don't mind spammers doing their thing -- those surfers that get spammed usually signed up for some bullshit and they deserve the spam just for being ignorant and not careful... but I'm careful enough to have had a clean email box for a long time now... I'm glad I'm not alone on this and I think Swoit will take some heat for this and it'll all be fixed.

In the future I won't get "Plat" programs mixed up and I'll use more distinct email codes when I sign up for things... next time I won't point the finger on this type of stuff now that I know how serious people are about keeping their lists clean...