i logged in to my ftp to update my site today right... and in the main directory i see 'dead.letter' so i open it up wondering wtf it is. and it's a spam letter... so i start looking through it right, and it's coming from my god damn server. someone has been spamming people for the past few months through logicdesigning.com. i started going through the old log files my server keeps of access. sure enough, a good few hundred thousand people have probably been spammed with it coming from my server. i'm going to be contacting the hosting company i'm with and have them take legal action against the jack *** who's doing it. jeff, lance, mitch, hunter, anyone that owns a site, if you use any type of script on your site that can send mail, watch out.

 

dead.letter sounds like a pine file (maybe there are other email clients that write it as well though...). if it is, that means either someone hacked a cgi script owned by your user account to get it to run an email program on the server, or they snagged your password from somewhere....

i could be wrong, but those were the first couple things that came to mind. definitely bring this to the attention of your hosting company/sys admins.

 

I did email my hosting company and called them. Someone found that I was running a mailing script on my server and is just using the cgi file to send. It's easy to do, but it still blows. I sent my hosting company all the log files and they say they're gonna find out who's doing it. Stupid credit card scammers.