Spammers often like to use a dictionary type of attack to reach users’ Inboxes. You have probably noticed that most spam now appears to come from your own email address. A dictionary attack is where spammers create or work off a list of addresses starting with the letter A, like Aaron@domain.com, and move down the alphabet. This means that if your email address starts with one of the letters towards the beginning of the alphabet, you are likely to receive more spam than a person whose address starts with the letter Z. Spammers seldom get to complete the list because either their source IP ends up getting blacklisted, or network administrators update their security measures to better detect the spam campaign.
As a result, administrators might begin changing the way they format email addresses. For example, they might purposely use letters further along in the alphabet to begin employees’ addresses, such as zaaron@domain.com, to prevent being targeted by a spammer. It might look odd, but it will help to reduce the spam that passes through, and help to protect your server from handling a lot of unnecessary traffic and filtering.
Another reason spammers use dictionary attacks is to try to get you to whitelist your own email address. DO NOT whitelist your own email address! This will give them exactly what they want: a free pass to your Inbox.
We should ask a question at the end! maybe ‘What do you do to combat dictionary spam?’
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