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On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 7:17 PM, Simon Avery wrote: > I've pulled up a few from my archive and you're right, they are primarily > btinternet.com origins. Apologies for overlooking the obvious! No worries. Though I did think for a moment you had uncovered a new twist to the campaign! > The volume especially recently suggests it's too widespread to be > individually compromised accounts. The volume has long been too large to be caused by insecure passwords, or keyloggers. And it also affected long unused, or tightly secured accounts. I believe spammers have found a way to compromise accounts en masse. What we don't know yet is how this happens. > Making somebody aware of a problem is the first step in resolving it. > Whether that second step is taken is entirely down to the willingness or > ability of that party to fix it. Given how long it's been ongoing, and how well-known it is in anti-spam circles, I highly doubt they're not aware of it. But big changes have happened at Yahoo. Perhaps they don't have the resources to dig into the issue. Perhaps the people who would know have long left. > Both Microsoft and Google have had reputation problems recently All three companies are really big. Running a free webmail service is only part of their business. Those working on, say, Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com are likely to care as much about the popularity of Windows 8 as someone working at the Department of Education will care about how well William Hague represents the UK abroad: they'd rather have it do/done well, but that's the extent of their caring. Yahoo is the only one of the three with a serious image issue at the moment. I would say they are the more likely to put pressure on their webmail department to sort things. It wasn't until the now famous "second bad apple hack" that I became convinced it wasn't a problem with insecure passwords, keyloggers or cross-site scripting. Until then I told people to change their password to a more secure one and, scan all the computers they had recently used for malware. (Neither of which are a bad thing.) Most victims may still believe that the issue is on their side rather than on Yahoo's. So in the bigger scheme of things, this may not hurt Yahoo too much. Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq