HACKER Q&A
📣 DeliriumTrigger

Anyone else getting spam mails with names from your contacts?


In the last week I started to get spam mails with the names from colleagues and friends as sender. Did someone else see that behavior pick up? My contacts are on my zoho and synced with signal, telegram (fat fingered) and google but nothing else.

  👤 dredmorbius Accepted Answer ✓
Your contacts are also likely available through your contacts' own contact lists, and wherever those have been exported.

Many apps and websites have long either openly or covertly imported contact lists. This is a common avenue for spam, phishing, and robocall / deepfakes attacks.

Individual experiences will vary greatly depending on whether or not your own contacts or those of an associate have been recently harvested or are being actively utilised.

I've long adopted the policy of not using platform contacts tools for my own contacts (flatfiles and mutt are my general preference). It's a downside risk of increased legibility.

👤 gjvc
Yes. This has happened to me for years, and I have never quite got to the bottom of it except that the people having their addresses hijacked in this manner have @yahoo.co.uk email addresses.