Someone out there has a virus that has harvested your address book and sent it on to some spammers. I don't know who it is, all I know is that they have my forum address stored on their computer. :-(

A couple days ago my email address that I use here "skp-forum at stanmiller.info" got picked up by a spammer, as of today it looks to have been shared/sold to several others and the number of spam messages directed to it is becoming a pain.

No big deal, I get this sort of thing all the time and have a simple fix, I turn the old address into a spamtrap and create a new one. So if you have the old adress stored on your computer please update it to the new one below. Unless of course you are the one with the infested computer! :-)

The computer that coughed up my address was most likely a Windows computer and from looking at the spam messages and reporting them it appears that most if not all of them are from Windows computers that have been infested, most likely by the Storm botnet software. Thanks Microsoft.

This is actually a fun detective process and sometimes with enough custom crafted addresses you can actually track who you know that has computer cooties. I use that for keeping track of mom's computer as she has a custom address for me, every time it gets spam I know I need to go disinfect her Windows machine. At least she has good cookies. The chocolate chip type, not computer type.

I do this for most places I share my address, and it works quite well. I made a purchase on ebay and a couple hours later I started getting spam to the address I use there. I contacted the seller and described the problem I was having, the lady was quite upset as she depended on her ebay sales for a good chunk of her monthly living expenses. She had a friend check out her Windows computer and he found a couple infestations. She is all cleared up now and I gave her another custom address to tuck in her inbox that will act as a trip-wire if she is infested again. Her friend set her up with a bunch of anti virus, spyware and trojan tools and she was considering getting a second computer to use only on ebay to reduce the chance of it getting infested.

Darn stan... Hope it isn't coming from my Suse systems

Dave