Bit of an odd Email incident

[Carruthers]

Thanks, limey.

It's a bit of a strange one though, isn't it?

One avenue of thought is that the sender might be sending Emails which then pick a name from my own address book giving them some initial credibility.

All in all, a bit worrying.

[glatt]

Somebody may have had their email address book compromised.

Either you, or your neighbor, or a 3rd party who knows both of you. Or maybe you are both on some other neighborhood mailing list and that list was shared publicly. There are lots of different ways it can happen.

I organize blood drives at my church. My name and email address has appeared in the church bulletin so you can reach me to sign up for the drives. Every so often, I get an email from the priest, but from a fake account that doesn't belong to the priest. It's somebody who looks online at church bulletins, and makes note of all the email addresses they can find, and then looks up the name of the priest at that church, and then creates a dummy email account based on the priest's name, and then emails those people whose email they have harvested. It's a lot of work, but if you can find a little old lady who isn't too sophisticated, and convince her that the trustworthy priest is emailing her personally about making a donation to a trusted charity, you might be able to get a couple grand from members of each congregation before everyone at that church figures out what's going on.

[Carruthers]

Thanks glatt!

The gentleman in question runs a neighbourhood news group which has a wide circulation and his address book must have a substantial number of entries.
As you suggest, the root of the problem would seem to lie there.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Speaking of email... who is... I am.
I got an email to a Gmail account. They always put the subject and as much text as will fit on the one line of the inbox stack. But this email had a blank subject line and no text, it was just this cartoon...



The heading Gmail showed me was...



I noticed where the k in talk is hidden anyone would read that as talk but the robot could not.

Then I wondered if they went to the trouble of deciphering the picture because there was no text to use for a heading, or are the looking at all pictures for text?
If they are doing all of them is it for the NSA worried about nogoodniks sneaking secret plans with pictures of words?
Or Google just building the dossier they keep on me?

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

If they are doing all of them is it for the NSA worried about nogoodniks sneaking secret plans with pictures of words?

Nobody need put words in those pictures. It is called lossy compression. A picture can easily be changed (byte by byte) and you would never know the difference. Even undecipherable color pixel changes, that nobody would notice, can be secret messages or computer code to compromise your data. Pictures (ie lossy compression) can easily compromise computer security.