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Anybody Heard of CISSE 2008?

I got a spam today advertising a ‘virtual conference’ called CISSE 2008. Apparently they compiled at least part of their spam list by harvesting the Mozilla Bugzilla database. Their address harvester had trouble with basic e-mail parsing but got enough of my address there to positively identify the source. It’s apparently organized by:

Tarek Sobh, Ph.D., P.E.
CISSE 2008 General Chair
Vice President for Graduate Studies and Research
and Dean of the School of Engineering
University of Bridgeport
Bridgeport, CT 06604, U.S.A.

I don’t know the school, but it got a .edu and the credentials above look real.

I’m curious if anybody reading here has heard of this. I’m sending an e-mail to find out if the credentials assigned are real and if so what theory of rights they have for harvesting the Mozilla database.

Update: I received a response saying that the e-mail list is built from the advisory committees’ members personal contact lists. I replied that my address that was targeted exists only in relation to BMO, I don’t use the address anywhere else (the words ‘bugzilla’ and ‘mozilla’ are in the address). I’ll update again when I hear more.

2 thoughts on “Anybody Heard of CISSE 2008?”

  1. Got three such mails sent at 14:13:43 -0700. One was to my real address. Two were to non existing addresses (random ? numbers) on my private domain, that I receive anyway, mine being the fall-back address for my own domain. I am not a professional and I do not know where they found my address. The two forged addresses on my domain clearly indicate voluntary spamming.
    Looking on Google (where I found this blog entry), there seems to be two different CISSE. A 12th CISSE was held in June 2008 at the U of Texas, Dallas. The spam is for a 4th (virtual) CISSE where CISSE has a different meaning.
    This 4th CISSE or CISSE 2008 is mentioned on a few sites of other universities. May be serious. Their way to spam people is not.

  2. I’m not sure if it is a real conference or not but I get a bunch of them, generally connected to stuff I do for Debian.

    It looks like spam to me, especially how I get bunch of them. The mailserver they use is blacklisted in some lists as well.

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