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Re: [LUG] Joining the Yahoo! spammers club

 

On 24/04/13 00:49, Simon Waters wrote:
> On 24/04/13 00:42, Martijn Grooten wrote:
>> That would be my guess too. Except that I hadn't used this account for
>> over a year (and even back then only a few times). And my PC, the only
>> place where I has ever accessed the account from, had been off for a
>> week because I was abroad.
> Yes, but we know they have compromised millions of account, so if it is
> cookie theft they may well have a big backlog to work through.
>
>> Still, I could have missed something somewhere. But there is bad apple's
>> case too. And others. I know of someone's test account, used once to
>> email another account, that ended up being compromised.
> I don't think in any case we have conclusive evidence that the browser
> didn't have a cookie from Yahoo, and wasn't used with other sites.
>
> Although "bad apple"'s case was highly suggestive of this, it is the
> kind of thing which is very hard to categorically rule out, since most
> people (understandably) don't clear cookies immediately on leaving a
> site (and even then it could be on-site advertising or some such).
>

We can *definitely* rule out cookies in my case: my Firefox instance has
cookie cutter type add-ons so I can control them minutely and like
Simon, I also drop and wipe all cookies (I have no whitelist whatsoever)
every time I exit Firefox and for me, that's every night. I have servers
to do the 24/7 stuff so any workstations/laptops I use during the day
are always switched off at bedtime. Further to that, Firefox is
configured to keep all it's volatile stuff in a RAM disk which obviously
enough can't persist across reboots (this is partly to reduce wear on my
SSDs and the security is an added bonus).

Anyway, I don't even know why I bothered typing that because I literally
*never* use webmail, I don't trust it. My old Yahoo account was accessed
precisely twice ever via Firefox: once when I initially created it and
secondly when I logged in to reset the password after the first spam
happened - apart from that I've only ever connected via Thunderbird, and
from this one machine too so definitely no avenue of attack for cookies
in my case. I also force plain text only on all my accounts as I hate
HTML style email with a vengeance so they can't even have snuck in via
an embedded iframe or pixel in a HTML formatted email.

I think that probably comes as close to 100% ruling out the cookie angle
or even XSS/CSRF/etc in my case as possible.

Damn, I would really love to get to the bottom of this somehow.

Regards

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