Tag Archives: monster

Monster phishing attempts

It may be just coincidence, but shortly after I wrote about John Burns from Monster.ie spamming a load of Irish IT pro’s, I’m now getting quite a few phishing mails purporting to be from Monster. They don’t have a plain text part, and interestingly purport to have been sent using Sylpheed on Linux:

X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.2 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-alt-linux)

The mails contain content like:

Dear Monster (Jobs & Careers) member,

Monster Technical Department requests you to complete Online Employer Form.

This procedure is obligatory for all clients of Monster.

Please select the hyperlink and visit the address listed to access Online Employer Form.

It could of course just be a co-incidence, but it seems strange that I’m receiving this now, shortly after making a post about Monster. I do have an account on Monster – I’m a little concerned that my account may have been one of the ones which fell into the hands of attackers in Monster’s recent data security breach (for more info read [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

Sidenote: Monster.ie head honcho James Mailley issued an apology for the whole spamming fiasco.

Monster.com spams then threatens Irish IT Pros

I wouldn’t normally bother to publish something like this, but the attitude that John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland is shocking, and I think is worth drawing attention to.

To summarise what happened, Monster.ie harvested a list of email addresses of members of IT@Cork members and used it to send an unsolicited, spammy mail to. He then tried to “recall” the mail (which only works with clients like Microsoft’s Outlook which are insecure enough to accept a request to delete a mail from your mailbox), again exposing everyone’s email addresses by not using the BCC field.

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