[RndTbl] Manitoba Hydro email database hacked (or sold)
Trevor Cordes
trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Sun Apr 26 00:13:25 CDT 2015
On 2015-04-25 Bradford C. Vokey wrote:
> Trevor Cordes (and myself) use vendor specific email addresses when
> we sign up for services (it's easy when you control your own domain).
Yes, it's shocking the number of big companies that leak my email:
xerox
primus
hydro
viewsonic
seagate
...
there's dozens, at least.
Also, I've found those little paper-based "enter to win" boxes at local
food joints / stores are all just big lying spam traps. I think they
are just phishing scams but in the physical world. Sometimes when I
have nothing better to do I'll enter those (with a unique email
address) and within months I get hundreds of spams to that address, and
AFAIK no one ever wins everything. I guess I fell for a "brick &
mortar" scam; were it a cyber scam I'd never fall for it. Luckily I can
just /dev/null that one-off address. "Woodlands" is the worst: they
claim to give away a nice looking oil painting each month. All they
give away is spam. Since this is in the "real world" and in Canada, why
aren't the cops on their case? I mean, someone has to pick up the
little boxes! Someone has to get consent from the retail establishment.
> So how (and when) did Manitoba Hydro get their email accounts list
> hacked?
>
> If so, what else got hacked? Our per-authorized Debit information?!?
Ha, ya. One would hope they'd be in separate DBs!
> If not, then did they actually sell their email accounts lists to
> spam lists?
That I *seriously* doubt. They'd get in big doodoo for that. Now, did
a single employee steal the list and sell it? Maybe... More likely
they were compromised somehow.
> ...P.S. If anyone wants to meet some desperate Russian chick feel
> free to believe in the spam...
Doh! By including the spam in your posting you a) got your email put in
my possible-spam-(low) folder, and b) present me with the dilemma of
whether to mark the entire email as spam or not-spam :-) I know Bayes
will most likely "do the right thing" but I can't see anything good
about giving "Russian chick" a less-spammy Bayesian weighting. Hmm, I
guess I will have to mark it as not-spam, as I don't yet have a maildir
folder called: "keep these emails, they look spammy but are not, so
don't train on them". That seems just one step too far down the road
to insanity.
;-)
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