Date posted: 27 May 2017, 10:43pm

Junk mail from "Killiney Golf Club"!

Have you recently received junk mail or spam proposing to come from "Killiney Golf Club"? Spam is an unsolicited message. Hopefully you didn't. And if you did, it didn’t come from Killiney Golf Club. Here's what the spam mails look like if they popped up on your screen.

What is Junk or Spam and can you do anything about it?

Junk or spam is an unsolicited email message. You don't want this stuff and it's intensely annoying and may also be dangerous.

Good practice dictates that you should delete suspect mail messages on sight. The spam or junk filter, which will be built into your mail system, should catch most of them, but not all. Some will get through. You should not click on any links or open or download any attachment unless you're absolutely certain that it's legitimate and you know who it is from.

Many email spam messages are commercial in nature. They may also contain disguised links that appear to be from familiar websites but in fact lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware. The messages illustrated above propose to come from "Killiney Golf Club". It's disguised. Phishing is looking for information, such as user names and passwords. And you definitely don't want malware, as it will screw up your PC.

How did they get your email address?

Spammers collect email addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses that harvest users' address books. These collected email addresses are sometimes also sold to other spammers. I guess that my email address was harvested from an address book.

Who sent these messages?

It's next to impossible to find out. One thing is certain. It wasn't the club.

The first message came from:

bruschi.federica@libero.it

This address is camouflaged or masked with the name: killineygolfclub.com.

liber.it is an Italian news website.

The second message come from:

kei23lupin96fuu620@i.softbank.jp

Softbank.jp is the web address of SoftBank Group Corp, a Japanese multinational telecommunications and Internet corporation. The address is camouflaged or masked with the name: killineygolfclub.com.

These messages were routed through the servers of Italian and Japanese companies. Where they originated is anyone's guess.

If you're curious!

As I said, don't click on a link in a mail message unless you know exactly what you're doing, and you've a high level of security built into your PC. However if you're curious,  the links in the mails illustrated above with flick through several web servers - all of which appear to be in Asia - and land on a web page displaying the following message.

Part of the URL is instantbrainboost.asia. That's "instant brain boost asia". 

If you see these emails, delete them. And stay safe.

Peter Bennett