Joe job
| Market | Online |
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| Media |
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them (see also e-mail spoofing), but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.
The name "joe job" originated from such a spam attack on Joe Doll, webmaster of joes.com, in 1997. One user's joes.com account was removed due to advertising through spam. In retaliation, the user sent another spam with the "reply-to" headers forged to make it appear to be from Joe Doll. Besides prompting angry replies, it also caused joes.com to fall prey to denial-of-service attacks that temporarily took the web site down, from antispam vigilantes who thought he had sent the email.
Some e-mail joe jobs are acts of revenge like the original, whether by individuals or by organizations that also use spam for other purposes. Spammers use the technique to cycle through domains and try to get around spam filters and blocks.
Joe-jobbers could also be businesses trying to defame a competitor or a spammer trying to harm the reputation of an anti-spam group or filtering service. Joe job attacks in other media are often motivated politically or through personal enmity.
Joe jobs usually look like normal spam, although they might also disguise themselves as other types of scams or even as legitimate (but misdirected) messages.
Joe jobbing (or "joeing") can take different forms, but most incidents involve either e-mail or Usenet. They are sometimes seen on instant messaging systems as well. In general, joe jobbing is seen only on messaging systems with weak or no sender authentication, or where most users will assume the purported sender to be the actual one.
If the joe-jobber is imitating a normal spam, it will simply advertise the victim's product, business or website. It may also claim that the victim is selling illegal or offensive items such as illegal drugs, automatic weapons or child pornography to increase the likelihood that the recipient will take action against the victim.
When imitating a scam, such as a Nigerian scam, or phishing scheme, the e-mail will still feature links to the victim's website or include contact information. In these instances, the joe-jobber is hoping that the recipient will notice the e-mail is fake, but mistakenly think the victim is behind the "scam".
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Wikipedia