I just wanted to tell you that Aweber was hacked earlier this week, so in case you are wondering about the source of the new deluge of "medical spam" or "EFTPS tax spam ", this might be it:
And here is Aweber’s response to the issue (and as before, the comments are closed for the article):
http://www.aweber.com/blog/uncategorized/data-accessed.htm
It is possible that not everyone would be able to recognize these phishing emails; in fact the "pending tax" emails look so much like the official emails then it is hard to tell they are using scams. I would suggest that you let your friends and relatives know about this (easiest way would be to just send them all to my boring blog, LOL :P ). I believe that among all people, it is the kids and elders who are much more vulnerable to this spam than anyone else!
Sorry, I rather woke up late to this news; otherwise I would have sent it sooner. I know not much can be done regarding this, as the damage has already been done, email addresses been compromised, and the only thing we can now do to stop the deluge of spam on our own end. If you use Gmail this is rather easy!
If you are using your own mail client you can:
-Keep blacklisting the spam senders
-Use a third-party spam blocker tool like Mailwasher pro (note that Mailwasher pro is nothing when used out-of-the-box; you should also sign up for an annual subscription to a service called Firstalert as Mailwasher pro uses their database to recognize a lot of spam).
You can use any other robust spam-blocker tool or service or none at all; it is up to you!
It is rather painful, having to blacklist 20-30 email addressees per day, coming up with new email filtering ideas, and so on – a BIG waste of time. Anyway, I hope we are able to cope with it. :)
Now, why in the hell would these morons send out EFTPS spam to non-US citizens like me is just beyond me. :P Thankfully I am on very few Aweber lists, and if *I* am getting so much spam, I can only imagine what others are going through!
So, how have you been coping with this new flood of spam? Please share your thoughts by clicking here. Thanks :D
Hi Arindam,
Well this is been happening all over, last week it was Facebook that got hacked!
You know me and my advice to being on the internet is this! If you do not want someone to get the information do not put it on the web. Also do not use your personal email address.
When is a secret not a secret?
When you tell someone else!
Ray
[…] just got this from a friend of mine, Arindam Chakraborty, who is also a fellow Internet marketer: Warning About EFTPS Tax Phishing Emails!Like me and many, many other marketers, he uses AWeber Communications email marketing service to […]
Hey Arindam,
Thanks for the info. I was wondering what was going on. A hundred emails at one time in my spam box. You would think the big boys would have better security measures.
Thanks again, and God bless.
Thanks for the information; it explains a lot.
I’m using Mailwasher but checking up to 200 bits of spam a day on each of two accounts is too much, so I’m having to create new email accounts and move all my genuine subscriptions to them.