In February 2022, we reviewed a scam email that claimed to be from Pornhub and attempted to confirm that the user had subscribed to the website, saying: "To STOP receiving these emails from us hit reply and let us !!" It read as follows:
sign up for email porn
The links in the email were formatted with "mailto:" and were not website links, meaning that they opened an email app instead of a website. Once one of those links in the scam email was clicked, it opened an email app and automatically filled in email addresses to receive the user's response. Those email addresses might also be scammers who would, in theory, be alerted that this person might be easy to scam with whatever ruse they chose.
According to a test done with a temporary email account, as of 2022, signing up for an account on Pornhub resulted in the company sending an email with the subject line: "Activate your new Pornhub account." The message came from noreply@pornhub.com, a genuine email account owned by Pornhub.
In sum, we recommend that readers avoid the Pornhub subscription confirmation email scam that says, "we are really excited that you joined Porn Hub" and asks users "to confirm your subscribe [sic]." It's a scam, and it's best to delete it from your email.
The emails date from late 2008, when Gov. Tom Corbett was attorney general, until early 2012, about the time Kane took office as the first woman and first Democrat to be elected attorney general. Corbett has said he was unaware of the emails.
The contract was made public 10 days after Kane announced she had hired a special prosecutor to examine whether any legal or ethical violations occurred as state prosecutors, judges and others used government computers to share emails of pornographic images and videos, and jokes about minorities and women.
In a previous interview with The Morning Call, Gansler said he and the firm have been tasked with reviewing all emails that flowed through agency computer servers in the last six years. The review goes beyond the pornographic, racially offensive and misogynistic emails that are part of a long-running scandal in Pennsylvania, he said.
Kane also has conducted internal investigations into who in her office sent or received the inappropriate emails before and during her administration. Her review resulted in the suspension and firing of some employees. Some of those suspended have since gotten promotions and raises. Some others have gotten their jobs back through arbitration.
The interim report from General Douglas F. Gansler that provided an objective, extensive and independent review of offensive email communications between the judicial branch of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Office of Attorney General was timely received by the Office of Attorney General. The Office of Attorney General now has available to it the complete record that is the basis for the interim report.
In an order dated July 28, Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy granted a request by county prosecutors to bar Kane from discussing the porn email investigation when her trial on alleged perjury charges commences on Aug. 8. The judge did not elaborate on her reasons for the ruling.
Kane has repeatedly implied the perjury-related charges lodged against her were part of an effort by detractors to force her out of office because she discovered pornographic emails being exchanged between state employees on state email addresses.
Kane, 50, a first-term Democrat who is not seeking re-election, faces charges of perjury, obstructing administration of law, abuse of office and false swearing in connection with allegations she orchestrated the illegal disclosure of confidential investigative information and secret grand jury information to the media and then engaged in acts designed to conceal and cover up her conduct.
A group of hackers calling themselves Th3 Consortium and claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec broke into yet DigitalPlaground.com, the third porn site it's hacked in as many weeks, stealing 72,000 passwords and 40,000 credit card numbers.
All three porn sites Th3 Consortium has targeted are owned by Luxembourg-based Manwin: Brazzers got hit in mid-February -- 350,000 usernames and passwords were stolen -- and then came a major hack at YouPorn -- a million usernames and passwords were compromised. But the porn network does not seem to be the real target of the attack: the hackers seem most interested in embarrassing government employees who used their official email addresses (for some reason?) to register for a porn site. Foolish government employees beware.
"And of course as this is a porn site," Th3 Consortium bragged in their release about the attack, "there was no shortage of .mil and .gov emails in their user list." The hackers' taunting of government employees could be nothing more than taunting. Those who have seen the data say that there are only a few dozen on the list.
But the hackers seem to share the view that catching government employees engaged in naughty online behavior -- whether it's watching porn or illegally downloading movies -- it refutes the calls for more aggressive enforcement of copyright laws. Fresh out of jail, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom sounded ready for some blackmail when he told TorrentFreak in an interview, "Guess what -- we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate." And we're not just talking about usernames and passwords in MegaUpload's case. It's terabytes of actual files. Luckily for these public officials, the government has control of that data for the time being.
There are three takeaways from the recent rash of porn site hacks. Number one: if you've got an account and credit card on file with a porn site, double check to make sure that info is secure. Two: Don't take the hackers too seriously. While they brag about how tens of thousands of accounts were compromised, those numbers are usually greatly exaggerated. And finally: if you work for the government, don't sign up for porn sites with your official email address. Taxpayers are paying to keep that address up and running. The least you can do -- if only to be courteous -- is set up a fake Hotmail account or something. And save the porn for your personal time. We don't want to pay for that -- or any resulting sexual harassment cases -- either.
My acct is innundated with porn spam... they usually go to trash but still...hundreds. I have tried blocking, and using Apple Mail preferences to automatically delete them, the sending addresses change all the time but many end with .us or .de... blocking those does nothing. I also notice when I use preferences to delete other spam, many of the porn will disappear when I apply that rule. Any ideas? Thanks!
Most web browsers have built-in features designed to alert you about dangerous or deceptive websites. If you receive one of these warnings, do not visit the site. However, just because a website does not generate a warning, does not mean it is legitimate. Scammers are constantly creating fake websites and it takes time for the browsers to detect them.
If you are asked to log in after clicking a link in an email, be careful. You may want to verify that you have reached the real login site by instead logging into the website separately outside of the email.
Be wary of any email, text message, social media post, or Internet advertisement offering a free gift card or other free gift. Such offers usually suggest that you will receive the free gift just for providing your personal information or completing a survey.
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act is a federal law that sets standards that email marketers must follow. The Federal Trade Commission and Office of the Attorney General are responsible for enforcing and penalizing violations of this act.
Use an email filter. Take advantage of all spam filtering tools offered by your email service and/or Internet Service Provider. If spam messages get through the filter and reach your inbox, mark them as spam to help improve the filters.
Review privacy policies and opt out of mailing lists. Before you submit your email address to a website, check their privacy policy to see if it allows them to share it with others, and then think twice before providing them your information. Also look for pre-checked boxes that sign you up for email updates from the company and its partners. You may be able to opt out of receiving these emails.
They claim that the economic downturn is hitting the porn business and that federal assistance is needed to boost the nation's sex drive. The pair add that they deserve the same treatment offered to banks and the automobile industry.
These are fake, autonomous programs that more often than not, try to entice Kik's users to click on paid-for sites with flirty conversations and the promise of porn -- glorified chat bots with one thing in mind.
Who is behind the porn bot epidemic? Security expert Cathal McDaid, who tracks spam on behalf of telcos and has looked into the matter extensively, says most of the porn spam is coming from a single criminal group. The group is probably English speaking and probably not from Russia, a country known for being the source of many other types of spam.
Most Kik users are savvy enough to avoid being swindled, so conversion rates are low, at around 0.5% and 1%. Still, hitting users en mass means the spammers can make decent money. Last year McDaid tracked a flood of porn bots that spammed more than 80,000 Americans over three days, all via SMS .
McDaid has scoured through the conversations of one of the most common Kik porn bots, and noticed that it re-used the same conversations from another porn bot that was active on MSN in 2010, and potentially on Google's GChat in 2011.
For the next few months, marketers will be figuring out the nuances of what makes a chat bot work so that, just like the porn bots, they can hold thousands of conversations with Kik users at the same time. 2ff7e9595c
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