Cobalt Strike "Beacon"

Hello Rob,

as you said you should never answer that kind of stupid and only report it to the local authorities, just because it means that your email adress is valid.

But I am Belgian living in Brussels Europe and my native language is french.

I have reported this message to the Belgian Crime Unit at ******@safeonweb.be, when no virus has been found nothing happens, just an answer like "thank you for having forwarded this message" but last month I have received about another sender a response that went like "we cannot treat this email because it contains a malware/virus file".

So I deleted it immediately.

Thanks for your support.

Rob:

I genuinely appreciate your informative response. I posted the comment below after receiving a Cobalt Strike "Beacon" email twice in the same day back in June 2022:

"This happened to me a couple years ago. I knew it was spam, but I found it very offensive and rude, so I reported it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). There is a simple online form you can fill out to file a complaint. It will make you feel like a responsible citizen - see something, say something - for a minute or two."

After reviewing all the posts about this issue is when I stopped opening and "unsubscribing" to the spam emails I was receiving and started pushing the spam that made it into my inbox directly into my blocked mail folder without opening it. Although I have not received any more threatening emails like the Colbalt Strike Beacon I still have problems with spam, despite implementing all the actions for handling spam mail you mention in your response.

Since you sound like you know what you are doing, I thought I would run a couple of questions your way (and the way of anyone else who can provide help). Bear with me, the second question requires a bit of a set up:

• Is the use of a preview pane the same as clicking on an email to open it?
• I use Outlook on my desktop (not Outlook.com) to send and receive email messages using my primary verizon.net email account. I also have a gmail and a yahoo email address that I access less frequently on gmail.com and rarely on yahoo.com, respectively (not on Outlook or Outlook.com). I have had my verizon.net email account since the beginning of email and have done what I needed to do (like I had a choice) over the years to survive the transitions from Verizon to AoL to Yahoo to Apollo Global Management. But of late, the spam mail has gotten out of control. Several times a day, using Outlook, I move spam from my inbox to my bulk mail folder, check my bulk mail folder for emails that need to move back to my Inbox before emptying my bulk mail folder. A couple of months ago, it occurred to me to try to stop the spam using the AoL account that I had to set up to continue using my verizon.net email address. On AoL, I could move the spam to the Junk mail folder and had the option to block the emails at the same time. However, there was a limit of 1,000 email addresses I could add to the blocked list. I reached that limit in a week. So, now I am back to using Outlook's Bulk mail. I understand that at some point in time I clicked on a link or links to something I shouldn't have and am not looking for an explanation of how this happened. I need a practical method to put a stop the onslaught of spam about CBD Gummies, African Manhood, Big Stomach, Hair Regrowth, Space Heaters, Diabetes, Timeshares, Horoscopes, Order Deliveries of stuff I never ordered, all the prizes I have won, and whatever this is 🚨 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫ð, once and for all. Any suggestions?

The email is completely fake:

Scam emails demand Bitcoin, threaten blackmail | Consumer Advice

Avoid Scams - Bitcoin

Never reply to such spam or scam messages, if the address they sent from is even valid, it typically belongs to someone else and at best this will tell the spam/scammer that your address is active and available to send more junk mail to.

The permanent failure was due to the fact the mailbox used to send the scam messages was disabled by the email provider, since all the major email providers cooperate by automatically reporting these to each other and getting them shut down long before most individual users typically manage to report them manually.

If you found your copy pf this scam message in your Junk or Spam email folder, leave it there. That means your email provider already determined it was a spam/scam, but to be safe they always forward a copy to you in case their automated detection systems had a hiccup and incorrectly identified a message you truly want as spam. Your action of moving the message out of the Junk/Spam folder tells their systems that this action was incorrect, which means you're just providing invalid information and doing nothing to help.

For this same reason, using the Oulook.com 'Mark as Junk' selection or similar Junk or Spam selections for an Inbox message in other email apps not only typically moves the message to your Junk folder, but it also automatically reports this 'bad' message to your email provider, which is far faster and simpler than looking up some obscure 3rd-party website or address to submit it by hand. In fact, since the in-app Mark as Junk or similar methods also include the full (hidden) email message headers your provider needs to properly identify the true source and path the message took to get into your mailbox, there's really no better way for the typical consumer to do this.

All other manual methods used to report, especially those to national organizations like the US FTC are really just 'catch-all', feel good repositories that collect these as a way to tell how prevalent the problem is, they really do nothing to solve the true problem or shut down the mailboxes being abused by the spammers.

Rob