100 Email Bouncebacks - Welcome to Backscattering

distefano links to a story on Computerworld, excerpting: "E-mail users are receiving an increasing number of bounceback spam, known as backscatter, and security experts say this kind of spam is growing. The bounceback e-mail messages come in at a trickle, maybe one or two every hour. The subject lines are disquieting: 'Cyails, Vygara nad Levytar,' 'UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you.' You eye your computer screen; you're nervous. What's going on ? Have you been hacked? Are you some kind of zombie botnet spammer? Nope, you're just getting a little backscatter — bounceback messages from legitimate e-mail servers that have been fooled by the spammers."

Re:same wine, old bottle

[KinkyClown]

This story was preceded less than a month ago: https://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/2258246 [slashdot.org]

No this message is a backscatter automated post so technically it's not a dupe.

Re:"legitimate?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Airport Announcer: "Mike Hunt? White Courtesy Telephone, please. Mike Hunt..."

Parents had a sense of humor?

Re:De-standardize, and make it worthwhile.

[Anonymous Coward]

MY JEWELER COULD NOT TELL
IT WAS NOT A REAL ROLEX!

More information how to buy an AAA+ quality replica!

Extension?

[dreamchaser]

"go and get extensions to your obviously miniscule penises "

I think one of their products can help them with that.

Re:De-standardize, and make it worthwhile.

[smittyoneeach]

Just publish a giant list of all mail servers not configured properly.

And then I manipulate this list to effect a soft kill on my competitor. If Acme Widgets has an apparently bad email server, who will do business with them?
Think Machiavelli.

I actually don't get any spam.. at all

[Anonymous Coward]

I've figured out how to stop all spam, and it's very simple: I block all incoming email.

I know what you're thinking... what about the false positives? Yes, there are some, but here's the great part of the system... the more spam I receive, the lower my false positive rate. I don't need to worry about backscatter, phishing, viruses, or anything, and the CPU usage for this is incredibly minimal.

Re:De-standardize, and make it worthwhile.

[Rufty]

Much easier to write a list of mail servers which are configured properly. At 66 lines per page, I'd reckon on about 5 sheets.

Same old, same old

[Grand Facade]

Computer World trying to get street cred by re-hashing old and moldy.

Nothing new here, move along.

Re:De-standardize, and make it worthwhile.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else? You could make vehicles a lot faster if, instead of putting them on logs, you put four little round disks at the corners! I know, let's call them wheels [wikipedia.org]!