How Spammers Abuse Whois and SMTP Part 2

In Part 2 of How Spammers Abuse Whois and SMTP, we will look at Email harvesting using Whois. Generally, when a user registers a domain, he is legally required to give contact information to the Domain Registrars. This information (which also contains his Email Address) is available to anyone who uses the Whois service. Thankfully, nowadays some Hosting Providers also allow setting up anonymous registration details to be displayed, to protect the user from being spammed.

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Links:

1. SPAM

2. Email Harvesting

3. SMTP Basics

4. Domain Tools

Vivek Ramachandran is a security evangelist and has been working in computer security related fields for the past 7 years. In 2007, Vivek spoke at world renowned conferences Defcon (WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon (The Caffe Latte Attack). The discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack was covered by CBS5 news, BBC online, Network World etc news agencies.In 2006, Vivek was announced as one of winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among 65,000 participants. He has also been a recipient of a Team Achievement at Cisco Systems for his work on 802.1x and Port Security modules on the Catalyst 6500 switches. Currently he spends all of his time maintaining Security- Freak.Net , SecurityTube.Net and is the founder of an online startup (currently in stealth mode). Vivek, is a Bachelor in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.You can contact him at vivek[at]securitytube.net