W3C lists hit by email spam abuse

Apologies to list participants. It would appear that a couple of W3C email lists were hit recently by an email spam. This appears to have come from a service offered by a content service in which they provide a web form to email copies of thier content. This mechanism appears to be insecure, masks the true originator of the email, and permits the initiator to add an unmonitored message to the forwarded content. I have personally contacted the providers of the service to complain.
 
Please note that messages like these are not in fact being sent by the person indicated in the "From" header. To the best of my knowledge, no virus was contained in the payload. The motivation for this service abuse appears to have been to take advantage of the sender-masking and the custom-text feature.
 
Again, apologies for any convenience this may have caused.
 
---Rotan.

Received on Monday, 31 October 2005 15:05:57 UTC