Avast forum careless with emails; complicit in sending viruses

[AlanHK]

We need to remember that once a smart person has made up their mind, it's very hard to
get them to see the errors of their ways. After all, they have thought it all through and they must be right even when they are wrong.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving

Okay Bob, instead of smug putdowns, can you answer these question?:

Why am I only getting this spam to this address, and not one of the hundreds of others I use?
Who else has a record of this email address, but not any of the others I use?

[AlanHK]

My address is 11 random characters. Would take trillions of tries.

A email address generator would make a trillion in minutes and some will work

Oh for God's sake. How the hell would it test them?

A spammer is going to send mail addressed to a trillion random addresses, 99.99999% of which will bounce?
That's a DDOS. Either 1) they'll crash the email server or 2) they'll get blocked. In neither case will more than a tiny proportion of their email get through.
Spammers don't do that, they buy huge lists of hacked names at less than a cent each.

[CraigB]

As you seem to be the only person complaining about this then someone must of hacked the forum data base, stole just your one email address and decided to spam their vendetta against you

Emails are guessed/copied all the time so no real surprise if one returns some spam now and again, computers are prone to being scanned for information as well so who's to say the information wasn't grabbed from your end as long as you don't reply to them then all is good, you can rest assured that Avast is protecting your information here and forum security has been much tighter since being breached in 2014 to which Avast also notified everyone of the breach and advised those to change login details.

[AlanHK]

As you seem to be the only person complaining about this then someone must of hacked the forum data base, stole just your one email address and decided to spam their vendetta against you

Or I'm the only one (of the half dozen who have read this) who uses a unique address for this forum and if you are getting this spam it was probably filtered out by GMail and in any case you could have no idea it is a result of your membership here.

Avast also notified everyone of the breach and advised those to change login details.

"breached in 2014"
I registered in 2013 and never got a notification of that.
 

So, when I go my profile to change the email address -- it's impossible.

The login name IS the email address. No option to change it.
Quite likely that is why email addresses leak so easily.
Brilliant design Avast. People never have to change their email addresses.

[CraigB]

As I said you're the only one with this issue, the forum security does a good job of protecting everyone.

Nothing else for me to add here.

[Eddy]

The login name IS the email address. No option to change it.

Yes there is and I told you where it can be done already.

"breached in 2014" I registered in 2013 and never got a notification of that.

The mail was send to everyone.
Perhaps you can't remember it, but that doesn't mean you weren't notified.
Things where also mentioned on the avast website and on this webboard.
If (and I say if because you still haven't proved it) the email address was retrieved during the hack of avast, you could (should?) have changed it over 2,5 years ago.

I created a real simple, not optimized code to generate random 11 character strings in basic.
On a old system (Athlon XP 2000+, 2Gb ram, running Windows 7), it takes about 2,6 seconds to generate 1.000.000 strings.
Do a little math and calculate how many strings a modern home-system (more cores, higher cpu clock, more memory, use of the GPU as well) can generate if the code was written in SSE2 (or a higher) instruction set...

Code: [Select]

'' Set screen mode - Resolution: 1024x768 Bits: 32 Colors: 256k
Screen 20,32

dim as string r
dim as double t1, t2, t3
t1 = Timer()
cls

For f As double = 1 To 1000000
For g As Integer = 1 To 11
r = r + chr(32 + (rnd*128))
Next
Next f
t2 = Timer()
t3 = t2 - t1
Print t3
Sleep

[bob3160]

We need to remember that once a smart person has made up their mind, it's very hard to
get them to see the errors of their ways. After all, they have thought it all through and they must be right even when they are wrong.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving

Okay Bob, instead of smug putdowns, can you answer these question?:

Why am I only getting this spam to this address, and not one of the hundreds of others I use?
Who else has a record of this email address, but not any of the others I use?

That wasn't meant as a put down and your continued insistence only proves it.
Spam is a hit and miss thing so it's very simple to have one email address receive lots of spam and another receive almost none.
You're barking up the wrong tree but apparently aren't willing to realize it. None of us can convince you of that fact.
Any further posts are useless. There are actually users that have a problem and need assistance. This isn't one of those places.

[Pondus]

Oh for God's sake. How the hell would it test them?

They dont test, they create random addresses and send out bulk mails to tens of tousands addresses and hope some hit a live address

This is auto done by computers / program and not a person sitting an doing this work, it is a automatic spam sending factory

Spammers don't do that, they buy huge lists of hacked names at less than a cent each.

Yes they do that also, they have more the one trick in there spam book


Spambot  >>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot

Email address harvesting  >>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address_harvesting