A strange SPAM procedure started occurring a couple of months ago. An email was sent to a government employee, which did work at one time, but a mail delivery failed message was returned. We contacted this individual by phone and they stated a problem was ongoing with their email account. A couple of days after this, we started receiving SPAM messages with the government employees first name used as the salutation. It seems as if the SPAM bot picked up the failed delivery message and first name from the email address and used our address as the destination. No SPAM expert we have talked with has been able to explain how this happened.
After some research we found an interesting site explaining backscatter SPAM. http://www.dontbouncespam.org/
Based on the authors definition, our SPAM problem appears to be a some type of backscatter variant. Yay.
six years later there is no indication that the spam … to exploit its weaknesses rendering the technique