Susan Pevensie

There seems to be some new kind of pest making the rounds on Windows Live. The past 3 days I have come to my computer after a good nights rest to messages from people I don’t know and that are not on my contact list. Windows Live will ask if I want to allow or block messages from people that are not on my contact list. Out of curiosity I allow it and there are a couple of variations of messages, so here is what I’ve seen. Everything in italics has been removed or changed for obvious reasons.

Now most phishing, viruses, or anything else that tries to steal your information usually puts your e-mail user-name (The text before the @domain.com) in a link that you can click and asks you to log-in on a website. Not this one! So far this just seems to be spam. Some messages provide links and some do not. If it does provide a link to click on it is a harmless blogspot address that redirects you to another adult website.

So far I have gotten this message from a few different identities.

• Candice (candicetocap@hotmail.com)
• Hollie (holliemykarez@hotmail.com)
• Joanne (joannevolofo@hotmail.com)
• Angie (cutiegrly1983@hotmail.com)
• Doris (doriskilgorerlvj@hotmail.com)
• Tara (friskygrly1983@hotmail.com)
• Marcella (marcellabuckwiwn@hotmail.com)
• Erma (ermalinmjgt@hotmail.com)
• Nut (nut13820@hotmail.com)
• patalung96815@live.com
• vanich94950@live.com

One thing that has baffled me is how they are getting your name in their message. The only thing I can think of is this could possibly be an attack from some spam company that bought a database of e-mails from a website that I (or you) have signed up at.

With all of the information I’ve gathered, I think this is just a harmless spam bot that has grabbed my e-mail from somewhere. Even then, I’m not sure how they got it because my messenger e-mail remains unpublished on the internet.

This is very suspicious, indeed…

Solution
The only thing that I can think of that we can do to stop these messages being sent to us is to simply disable the receiving of messages from unknown contacts. Follow the following steps to disable receiving messages from unknown contacts:

• In Windows Live Messenger go to Tools
• Select Options
• Select Privacy
• Tick the box that says, “Only people on my Allow List can see my status and send me messages.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 10:14 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.