[ale] OT(ish) Sold or stolen?

[Horkan Smith]

At least in my case, it wasn't targeted random - I got *thousands* of machine-generated random usernames, probably tens of thousands in the logs.  One or two of 'em happened to match something I'd used, purely by chance.

later!
   horkan

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 12:47:32PM -0700, Alex Carver wrote:
> On 2014-09-03 09:09, Horkan Smith wrote:
> > You've probably checked and eliminated this, but I've had periods where the spammers sent loads of completely random email usernames that were obviously auto-generated.  Every once in awhile, they've matched one of the ones I actually use.
> 
> Yeah, these are generated as a mashup between a prefix (like 'att' or
> 'boa') and a suffix that comes from something like pwgen or tempfile.
> So anyone randomly spamming would have to guess the entity to spam and
> then come up with the random sequence that fits what I have.
> 
> It's not implemented in a way that is as complicated for places that use
> the email address as the user login (since I have to remember it) but
> for this use by AT&T, it's not the login so it's very complicated/random.
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-- 
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net