Aug 18, 2008 : School Spreads 1.5m Spam Emails

📅 August 18, 2008 - Hackers gaining access to the New Zealand's University of Otago staff member accounts used it to send out a reported 1.55 million spam emails in two-and-a-half days, in what is considered by commentators as an "old school" technique that is still effective in the age of spamming as a service.


According to a report from the Otago Daily Times, spammers tricked four staff members into revealing login details impersonating university officials, which they used to send as many spam emails as they could before getting caught.

"The university is currently experiencing access and delivery issues with Stonebow webmail," read an official University of Otago statement published Friday. "A number of Stonebow accounts have been compromised by staff members responding to a phishing email. These accounts have been used to distribute spam. This has resulted in the university mail server being blacklisted by a number of providers."

While the compromised accounts have been shut down, the university has a lot of cleaning up in the coming days. The school's IP reputation has been tarnished, its mail servers blacklisted causing a DoS attack to its staff and students, according to ZDnet security blogger Dancho Danchev. Also, anti-spam service PureMessage will be unavailable Tuesday to enable software updating.

As educational institutions become increasingly difficult to maintain secure, companies have responded with services tailored to the ivory tower, including email services provider AtMail (http://www.atmail.com) that supplies email services to Princeton and Duke, and security provider Mi5 Networks (http://www.mi5networks.com) that keeps Moravian College's campus free of malware and botnets.