To the Person Who Tried to Steal my Password

I recently received an e-mail that claimed to have come from "webmaster@angelfire.com". The e-mail was an obvious forgery. It was an attempt to get me to reveal my Angelfire password. All I can say is, "Yeah, right!" Heeding Angelfire's warnings about such attempts, I did not give them any information at all.

I have no way of knowing whether my page in particular was being targeted, or if there was a more general attack against Angelfire pages going on. I would normally suspect the latter but for the recent alleged "cracking" of Steve Martell's Anti-Rolf page. Mr. Martell's page is back up again, but its recent brief takedown is a reminder of how much emotion is raised on both sides of the chain-letter/pyramid scheme issue.

Here is the e-mail I received (the frequent spelling mistakes are the sender's):

Received: from lmtp12.iname.net (HELO smv06.globecomm.net)
(165.251.8.121) 
 by mta104.yahoomail.com with SMTP; 7 Jan 1999 11:17:00 -0800 
Return-Path:  
Received: from mserv.rug.ac.be (mserv.rug.ac.be [157.193.40.37]) 
 by smv06.globecomm.net (8.9.1a/8.9.1SMV) with ESMTP id OAA26091 
 for ; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 14:16:03 -0500 (EST) 
Received: from eduserv1.rug.ac.be (eduserv1.rug.ac.be [157.193.40.9])

 by mserv.rug.ac.be (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id UAA20622 
 for ; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 20:14:44 +0100 (MET) 
Received: from angelfire.com (ftwe23.rug.ac.be [157.193.103.23]) 
 by eduserv1.rug.ac.be (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id UAA22202 
 for ; Thu, 7 Jan 1999 20:14:38 +0100 (MET) 
Message-ID: <3695079E.879A0E0A@angelfire.com> 
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 20:14:38 +0100 
From: Nobody Add to Address Book 
Reply-To: webmanager@angelfire.com 
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [en] (WinNT; I) 
MIME-Version: 1.0 
To: cbw@innocent.com 
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM ANGELFIRE 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii 
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 
Content-Length: 671 

Hi member

Because of the fact that our hard disks are almost full by the
incredible succes of our virtual neighborhood, we have to ask our
members if they want to keep their website at Angelfire.

If you want keep your site, e-mail me back your MEMBER NAME, PASSWORD
and URL (website address) WITHIN 72 HOURS. If you ignore this, your
Angelfire website account will be deleted!
   
I hope you understand the necessarity of this action.
   
If your account would be deleted because you didn't answer as fast,
you
can still join Angelfire again by subsribing to the Register!

Thank you for choosing Angelfire.

Angelfire
http://www.angelfire.com
webmanager@angelfire.com

(End of e-mail.)

To my fellow Angelfire page owners, I can only reiterate Angelfire's advice against giving your password to anyone, especially if they claim to be an Angelfire administrator. That is a dead giveaway that they are lying. Angelfire would not ask you for your password in an e-mail; they already know your password.

Carl Winslow

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