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.