It turns out that the random number emails are from a trojan on another machine. The trojan is called W32.Beagle.FC. These infected machines download a file from a host machine that contains email addresses and then tries to send email in order to confirm that the email address is live.
Basically the spammer made a trojan file that it is using to validate email addresses. If you received the email then the spammer knows your address and that it is a live mailbox. You are probably not infected.
The subject is always one of 455, 557, 56757 or 586876
The body is always 5556 or 969
Read more at:
Symantec Virus Information
Thanks, lxnx, for this info.
2 Comments
Hi Keith :-)
I don’t know if this was mentioned earlier but in (IE) your links on the right sidebar overlap the body of your posts.
I love your Blog, especialy when you have cat pictures.
Jim
Jim,
Thanks for the heads up. The link that I imbedded in the quote refused to wrap and screwed up the formatting. I am always tinkering with the blog template and I am thinking about a new format for it.
I changed the link so it should be ok for now, but if I have a wide graphic or link in another post, it will happen again so I have to ponder this.