Suddenly I started receiving a bunch of scam mails (phishing). I suspect some bot or bot-net is involved, because I’ve received maybe a couple hundred e-mails at the time of writing, all from different (likely auto-generated) senders. With anything from 2-10 emails per day.
The scam is essentially just some phishing, all related to the same topic. I’ve mostly been able to mitigate it by filtering out mails containing certain keywords or phrases that show up in the scam mails. However, the mails change relatively often (about once a day) so every now and then something gets through, and I’ll update my filter.
My question is really if there’s any way I can figure out
- Where this is coming from,
- How they got hold of my email
So that I can try to go after the root cause / prevent other scammers from getting hold of it.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
You can check this site for specific/recent breaches. That said, your email may have been exposed in an older breach that’s just now getting spammed as well.
Thanks! There was nothing there, so it may be from an older breach like you suggested :/
This site only shows if your email address is floating around on some illicit data set.
There are plenty of ways to scrape email addresses without stealing them.
You probably signed up for something using your email address, clicked agree to share it with the company’s trusted partners, all 3,000 of them, and one of them proved not to be so trustworthy.
And that’s why creating aliases can be so beneficial. When one company sells off your data you can identify exactly which it was based on where the email was sent. Later you can reject all emails to that specific address and call it a day.