Hacker News Reader

Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

The spam is quite likely coming via Google itself.

Google's mail servers have been compromised for several weeks now. It's commonly being used for infected crypto spam (all those "new traderbot" emails with the attached infected PDF, for example). I'm not yet sure if these are just compromised GMail accounts, or if the mail servers themselves have been compromised. There seem to be some reports on AbuseIPDB of intrusion attempts coming directly from Google's mail servers.

I've tried reporting it to Google (eg via SpamCop), and Google declines to receive reports. I have been reporting it through AbuseIPDB as well. Here is one Google mail server that has had over 300 abuse reports:

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.167.48

There are many more, and I linked to a few more when I posted about it here on HN over a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434810

View on HN

Yes, I've noticed this crypto/traderbot spam campaign a few weeks ago, and it definitely comes from Gmail itself. It's nice to see that it also affects other Gmail users. Maybe Google will finally get their act together and stop all the Gmail spam. Right now, I get about 100 spam emails from Gmail each month, making it the biggest source of spam for me. If it wasn't that half of the world uses their services, I'd have blocked Google's mail servers a long time ago.

weeks? more like months. Yep, can't report them via SpamCop. I always report them via https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse?hl=en Not sure why they can't fix their crap.

Thank you! I somehow never came across that URL before. It's worth a try, though I'm not very optimistic it will help!

I'd genuinely be interested to know from someone working at Google why Google can't / won't solve this, even for the narrow clearly-defined cases I see.

Occasionally I e-mail code@google.com I think someone somewhere actually reads it

A) How much money does it cost Google to fix a problem?

B) How much money does it cost Google to not fix a problem?

If A > B then, duh!

How many Google "engineers" do you need to change a lightbulb ?

Apparently, 10% less than they currently have?

100: 1 to actually change the lightbulb and 99 to build a new chat app

How many GoogExes does it take to unscrew the lightbulb is the next question that comes to mind

Just set a filter to automatically forward spam to sundar (at) google (dot) com

You assume of course someone not related to Googs other than having a gmail account is NOT the one with that email address.

Unfortunately every major provider has this happen. Google and Microsoft especially since they have their productivity platforms that send mail through the same infrastructure as their free email services. They also have to deal with more problems through compromised education accounts - students aren't that great at protecting their school credentials, and some businesses aren't much better.

I don't think that it's common for a Google mail server to be brute forcing SMTP logins for other servers, and also sending high amounts of spam. It looks like the server has been compromised, or else why would Google be making SMTP login requests?

You can give Gmail your SMTP login details and tell it to send your mail via another server.

Those outbound VIPs aren’t attached to “a mail server”. If some outside party has gained the level of access you are suggesting, to just freely use these VIPs, then they have compromised the entire Google.

Whatever happened to the Postini acquisition, did they get diluted over the years?

> compromised GMail accounts

If it is coming from compromised Gmail accounts, I wonder if these same accounts are also being used to post the handful of deep-fake Elon Musk crypto YouTube Shorts that inundate the Shorts feeds.

There's hundreds, maybe thousands of these videos being posted making Shorts practically unusable. And no amount of reporting or downvoting seems to affect their algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com