Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire
A major win in the battle against the spammers River City Media (RCM) occurred recently. Backups of their spam recipient database were poorly secured, they were discovered and made available online. Resulting in a massive dump of email addresses onto the public domain.
What does this mean for you? It is likely that you or someone you know has personal info contained in this database of 1.4 billion email accounts combined with real names, user IP addresses, and often physical addresses.
How do I know if my info was compromised? There are ways to check your email address against known breaches of personal data. Here is one great resource for looking up to see if your info has been compromised:
Enter your email address and it will let you know if it has been part of any breaches and hacks using various sources. What we like about this service is that it provides details about the breach and the time frame it occurred. You can also sign up to receive an alert when your info gets breached again. If you show up on this list we recommend that you immediately change the password for the services and accounts affected and anywhere else that your password for the affected site has been used.
For more information please read the following linked articles. A big kudos goes out to the cooperative team of investigators from the MacKeeper Security Research Center, CSOOnline, and Spamhaus for helping to identify and slow down these spammers.
Sources:
https://mackeeper.com/blog/post/339-spammergate-the-fall-of-an-empire
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3176433/security/spammers-expose-their-entire-operation-through-bad-backups.html
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/200572/20170307/spammergate-1-4-billion-email-addresses-and-user-details-found-online-as-spammers-backups-leak.htm
image credit: techtimes.com
