Over the past 12 hours or so, I’ve received a handful of email messages from around the world. The Subject is a series of numbers, 4 to 6 digits. The only text in the body is a group of eight hexadecimal characters. I don’t see a correlation between any of the info in the messages, or the email address recipient. Here are the messages I’ve received so far, at several different domains:
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Subject: 45636
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 14:44:17 +0200
39B98E9f
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Subject: 445537
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 06:41:52 -0700
6b35C249
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Subject: 420941
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 04:33:18 +0200
2Aa06200
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Subject: 81936
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 21:00:21 +0800
98627CEB
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Subject: 1193
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 15:00:54 +0200
8E101dCE
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Subject: 236673
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 14:57:38 +0200
04d3f112
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Subject: 91189
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 20:19:56 -0600
eF2aEf2c
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Subject: 82277
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 20:56:56 +0800
CBD3a823
We’ve seen this before, the last time about 3 months ago. Stuff like this is generally address harvesting and is a precursor to a major spam run.
I used to think it was broken spamware but it occurs so often that I know believe that the attacks are co-ordinated.