If you came here because you received a spam e-mail that appeared to
come from me please read what follows.
In the past week or so I have started to receive many e-mails that are being
bounced back to me as undeliverable. I have checked these out and I am fairly sure the outgoing
message which is being sent back to me, did not originate from my computer although it appears
to have been sent from my domain g0cqk.co.uk. I am exploring these non delivery messages in
Mailwasher before deleting them. They often contain image files that are not to be found anywhere
on my computer. The originating traces - HELO/EHLO & TCP/IP addresses seem to be all over the
world - time stamps are UTC+1:00, UTC+5:30, UTC+9:00, UTC-8:00 e.t.c and some of the times are
when my computer was not switched on. The X-mailer varies between Outlook and Thunderbird.
I do realise that all of these can be forged and so may mean nothing.
My computer here has Avast anti-virus up-to-date and a scan has shown no infection. I also have
Spybot installed and up-to-date and it finds no problems apart from a couple of tracking cookies
that it has deleted. Adaware with latest definitions found only one tracking cooking from a news
site that I use. I also have the HOSTS file from mvps.org and I am running two software firewalls
viz. Windows XP standard and Sygate. I am monitoring the traffic log of Sygate and I am not seeing
any unusual internet access by any applications. My internet access is through our home network
through a Draytek router with firewall. Bottom line, I think that I am OK here unless all of
these apps that I am using are missing something.
My conclusion is that some trojan has hijacked my domain (g0cqk.co.uk) and has infected a series
of computers that are generating and e-mailing spam. I have no idea what volume is being generated
but I assume it may be large.
Currently there only a few valid e-mail addresses in the g0cqk.co.uk domain but I will not publish
them here in any text format as a spammer may hijack them. I have alerted some key anti-spam sites/software but if
you do get unwanted spam from this domain, please accept my apologies. Unfortunately it is somewhat
down to the many naive computer users who think they do not need antivirus software even though
effective free versions are available from Alwil
(Avast) and AVG.
Thank you for reading this