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Did You Get Viagra Mails From My Mailing List?

Posted on May 1st, 2010 by admin in Buying & Selling, Domain News | 4 Comments »

A couple of people emailed me (I believe 4 people) over the last 4 months complaining that they received spam emails to addresses that they only used to subscribe to the dnxpert newsletter. They were upset and since the email addresses were used exclusively to sign up to the dnxpert newsletter, they assumed I had something to do with that.

The emails were primarily spam emails trying to sell Viagra or Viagra alternative products.

Obviously, this concerned me greatly, since I would never think of selling or passing on email addresses of my subscribers. How could this happen?

I use the services of a highly reputable company to run the dnxpert newsletter – Aweber.com. Aweber has been around since 1998 and carries a high level of credibility as a top notch newsletter subscriber service.

I contacted them a while back to raise my concerns about these spam reports ( as there are probably other people that were upset by this but never bothered to write to me ) and they said it was probably a bot phishing for email addresses (stock answer).

Today I ran across a blog post they wrote back in December 2009 which explains what actually happened:

Here is what the blog post said:

AWeber was recently the victim of an intentional attack to mine email addresses.

We’d like to take this opportunity to share what happened, what was (and was not) affected and what we’re doing as a result of this attack.

What Happened?

We use a variety of pieces of software to run different parts of our service and provide support to customers. Some of these are tools we have developed ourselves; others are third-party ones that we license from other companies.

By exploiting and combining vulnerabilities in two separate third-party software systems, the perpetrators managed to gain access to a part of our system where subscriber email addresses are stored.

We have received reports of some of those email addresses receiving spam messages. While the volume of these reports is low, we are treating this incident with the utmost seriousness and addressing it fully.

Who Did This?

We have reason to believe that the party responsible for this was either directly or indirectly a part of an overseas organized group.

What Data Was Compromised?

As noted above, the information that was exported was strictly subscribers’ email addresses.

What Data Was NOT Compromised?

All other customer information was and still remains secure and unaffected:

* AWeber customers’ personal information was not compromised.
* No credit card data was compromised.
* No customers’ names, “from” or contact email addresses, postal addresses, website URLs or any other profile information were compromised.
* No affiliates’ names, contact email addresses, tax ID numbers, website URLs or postal addresses were compromised.

Additionally, while the perpetrators did acquire some email addresses, the AWeber system was NOT used to send out any spam email on behalf of these perpetrators. Any spam sent to these subscribers was sent via the perpetrators’ own systems. This is important to note because this means it will not affect deliverability rates.

What Are We Doing About This?

We have identified and fixed the vulnerabilities that were used in the attack.

Additionally, we are evaluating other options for these and other third-party softwares that we use to determine if there any other solutions that offer further protections.

As you know, AWeber is staunchly opposed to spam. We take great pains to make sure that our customers engage solely in permission-based email marketing and utilize best practices. We participate in and learn from communities such as the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group to help fight the global messaging abuse problem.

We’re Sorry & Special Thanks

We’re very sorry this occurred and may have affected you. We have taken extra steps beyond fixing the problem to ensure that such a breach cannot occur again.

We appreciate the trust and support our customers have expressed throughout the process of investigating this event and reinforcing the security of our systems.

Hopefully this explains what happened and assures anyone subscribed to my mailing list that it won’t happen again.

If you have any concerns don’t hesitate to write me.

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