Search Engine - Email harvesting

[wryghta]

Hi.

I use the FAST (Yahoo owned) search engine. Last week for a project I had to research Cyrillic font (Russian etc) and some info about Khazakstan, Azerbaijan, etc. And I installed Cyrillic as a font on my PC. Three days later I started for the first time ever to get Russian Language spam. This cant be a co-incidence.

Any ideas? Like does FAST/Yahoo track email addresses and sites visited for their clients? Do all search engines do this?

[StevenUnderwood]

And I installed Cyrillic as a font on my PC. Three days later I started for the first time ever to get Russian Language spam. This cant be a co-incidence.

26824[/snapback]

Is it possible you were receiving the spam but it was not being displayed properly on your screen until you had the font installed? I've seen the opposite before....someone asking what the garbage characters were, I installed a Chinese font, and the spam looked perfect

[qjvgpuryy]

I know that I have received spam for software after related Google searches - enough that I was also thinking that it couldn't be a coincidence. I wouldn't think that Google or any of the sites I chose to go to would be able to (directly) get the e-mail address, but I could be wrong. (They do get the IP address I'm browsing from - would they really go to the trouble of converting that to a website, scanning some address list for that site and sending spam to any and all matching addresses? The address I'm using isn't posted on the site, so they can't harvest it from there.)

Something to think about ...

[wryghta]

Is it possible you were receiving the spam but it was not being displayed properly on your screen until you had the font installed?  I've seen the opposite before....someone asking what the garbage characters were, I installed a Chinese font, and the spam looked perfect

Nope, in fact the new email contained chars witn 80 bit set, and as I had disabled Cyrillic font for "Non UTF8" the email showed as heavily accented "roman" letters.

And this was the first time I have had un-readable mail.

But thanks for the thought.

David

[WisTex]

You could possibly have some spyware/adware installed. You may have even told them your e-mail address when you downloaded it or they guessed it by scanning your computer. Then the spyware noticed that you surfed some Russian sites so started sending you Russian spam as well.

I would recommend scanning for spyware/adware and make sure your computer is not infected with a keylogger or adware that turns your computer into a zombie.