I’ve received two spams in the past two days to cheaptickets at-sign zettabyte.net, an address I used once exclusively for the Cheaptickets.com website. Cheaptickets has since been assumed by Orbitz. I haven’t received legitimate mail to that address in a year and a half or more.
<p>There are four possibilities:
- Orbitz mailing list has been compromised by a hacker.
- Orbitz or one of its agents has sold its mailing list to spammers.
- Orbitz doesn’t use the opportunistic encryption I support on my mail server and someone tapped the line between here and there and intercepted a mail. And sat on the intercept for two years, ensuring the poor quality of their intercepted mailing list.
- Someone is targeting cheaptickets@every.domain just in case there’s a mailbox there.
<p>The last two are very unlikely. The first two are very disurbing. I wrote to abuse@cheaptickets.com two days ago, and despite an autoreply with the promise of a real reply within three hours I haven’t received a response.</p>
<p>Postscript: Or maybe Orbitz gave their list to the DHS and <i>they</i> were compromised.