Monster Problems

[da]

Security breach at Monster likely involves sophisticated personalized attacks on hundreds of thousands of customers, now likely millions. (Yesterday's Reuters article). The scary part of this is that the Ukranian thieves of Monster user data apparently weren't performing identity theft using that data; they were grabbing user info in order to custom-craft recruiter emails, which, if the job-seeker clicked on the links, would install malware on their computer (which would then perform identity theft).

So- if you've ever been associated with Monster, be very careful about any recruiter emails, even if they don't say they're from Monster; make sure your email reader won't run executable programs from links in the email.

I'm grumpy about how stupid this is, that thieves were able to get all this information; and expect they could go and do more fishy things with the data, besides sending these fake recruiter emails.

Of course I'm also grumpy about this since I do have a Monster account, but the particular scam seems less likely to cause problems for me since I did use a unique email address for Monster, and I also read Monster email in a non-GUI non-windows mail-reader.

Ugh.

Comments

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

I have an unused coder.com address? Since when?

Given that you don't even use coder.com as your main mailserver I doubt I want you to run a reliable mailserver for free on my behalf.If I wanted an unreliable mailserver I could probably stick with Freeshell.

My e-mail woes are not yet over. I think I am probably going to launder my mail through Yahoo!, and use its POP functionality to actually download and read my mail. I have figured out how to POP my mail down, but I have not got SMTP uploads working yet.

What text-based mailreader do you use? I thought you were a GMailer?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Apparently, since Feb 7 2004.

Yes, I do. I use gmail for mailing lists, and coder for random stuff that I'd prefer using my old address(es) for.
On coder, I read email in pine. Inside screen, of course.

There are no guarantees, but it's reliable in the sense that if it goes down, it's because the home router's gone wandering, and I bring it back myself in 30 minutes or less (kw.igs.net hasn't had an outage of more than a few hours for... I don't remember how long).

Of course it's totally up to you, and I wouldn't necessarily trust some flaky server in some guy's closet with my email, just on the say-so that he trusts it for his own email. Cause what kind of a nut is he anyway, to go on about himself in the third person.

..I don't know if yahoo will do this, but gmail will allow you register for a "gmail for your domain", and set the IP for your domain to gmail's server, then hey presto, your own domain's got gmail.

How would you get a domain? Well, I was also thinking, you're welcome to any subdomain (really, just about any; it's perfectly free, just one line of DNS) on coder, which would then possibly last a while. Might or might not be more permanant than yahoo. Yes, I suppose I am that full of hubris.

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

I am definitely apprehensive about giving Google all my e-mail information in addition to all of the web surfing information that they have now.

Your offer is exceedingly kind. I will have to think about it. My inclination until the referendum is over is to stay with Yahoo, though. I already have had to send out two sets of painful apology e-mails this year.

What I really should do is give up on e-mail and the Internet completely.