Ask HN: Google Doc email virus?

Post by aroch » Thu, May 04, 2017, 1:23 PM UTC

jacobr1 wrote: post #158

mailinatorguy wrote: post #74

Mailinator here: Yes, we sent the inbox to a blackhole but keep in mind, Mailinator does not and can not actually "Send" any email. It's a receive-only service. As always, any email "from" @mailinator.com has had it's reply-to forged (which is pretty trivial). Also - even before we blackholed the email, it's unlikely any email in that inbox (i.e. hhhh..) was read. Each box has a 50 email limit (FIFO) which was immedi…

I don't see a TXT record for _dmarc.mailinator.com. If you created a DMARC reject policy all the major webmail providers would block messages "from" mailinator.com

Post by Clubber » Thu, May 04, 2017, 2:20 PM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #176

Clubber wrote: post #159

The bad thing about centralized internet is it makes some mail servers much juicer targets than the decentralized mail servers of old. I decided gmail wasn't for me when I read they harvested your emails for ads. 1GB in 2004 sounded so enticing too! If you are technically savvy and have access to a static IP, I highly recommend setting up postfix/dovecot and registering a domain. It's fairly straight forward for tech…

And then nobody ever receives your mail because the big mail servers don't trust you.

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, May 04, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

discordianfish wrote: post #193

hemancuso wrote: post #12

It's a pretty nasty one, since it uses their standard OAuth flow with an app "Google Docs" to have users grant full access to their email and contacts. 1. I can't believe Google doesn't have basic filters to disallow developers from registering an app named "Google Docs" 2. Perhaps there should be some more validation/limits associated with allowing apps on the platform that can gain full access to email. A secure em…

> 1. I can't believe Google doesn't have basic filters to disallow developers from registering an app named "Google Docs" Believe! I think this is just one of the many cases where after the fact everyone is like "oh wow, how didn't they think about it". But that doesn't say you would have thought about this before reading this.

Post by Raphmedia » Thu, May 04, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

cmg wrote: post #199

bastih wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was "Google Docs"

I understand that - my question is whether the name is actually a factor that contributed to the spread. As AfroThundr said above, people just want to get to their content and want the dialog to go away. A known contact sends you a document - you're going to trust that and want to see the document. Unless it said the app name was "I'm going to hack your bank account" they'll probably click it (and even then, some wou…

Post by soared » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #60

mintplant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, they're using Google Analytics to track its spread. That's a nice touch.

It's possible to send any data we want to their Analytics tracker... perhaps we send them some spam?