I got an e-mail from some place called britereyes.site, saying that i
have been chosen! I have not allowed Preferences to open up, and I can
find very little info. on it. Does anyone know what this spam is about?
It will get deleted anyway, just curious.
--
Davey.

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* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:11:21 +0000, Davey wrote:

I got an e-mail from some place called britereyes.site, saying that i
have been chosen! I have not allowed Preferences to open up, and I can
find very little info. on it. Does anyone know what this spam is about?
It will get deleted anyway, just curious.

FWIW I have a copy of the Lynx browser installed for exactly this sort of investigation - its very simple: basically stripped to the essentials of
just displaying the text on a page and gives yo complete control over
what, if anything, you'll accept in the ways of cookies.

When I find a dodgy URL I do approximately this:

- ping it to see it its real
- use 'host' so see what IPs, mail servers, etc the URL points to
- do a 'host' reverse lookup to check that the IP(s) point to the
expected domain name
- use 'whois' to see who claims to own the site
- use Lynx to see if there's a web page at the URL and if so, to read
what it says about the website. A lot of dodgy sites just display a
generic, uninformative set of boiler-plate HTML pages. To me this says
DODGY SITE but ymmv.

Consider what those show to decide whether the site is dodgy or not and
act accordingly.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:38:41 -0000 (UTC)
Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:11:21 +0000, Davey wrote:

I got an e-mail from some place called britereyes.site, saying that
i have been chosen! I have not allowed Preferences to open up, and
I can find very little info. on it. Does anyone know what this spam
is about? It will get deleted anyway, just curious.

FWIW I have a copy of the Lynx browser installed for exactly this
sort of investigation - its very simple: basically stripped to the
essentials of just displaying the text on a page and gives yo
complete control over what, if anything, you'll accept in the ways of cookies.

When I find a dodgy URL I do approximately this:

- ping it to see it its real
- use 'host' so see what IPs, mail servers, etc the URL points to
- do a 'host' reverse lookup to check that the IP(s) point to the
expected domain name
- use 'whois' to see who claims to own the site
- use Lynx to see if there's a web page at the URL and if so, to read
what it says about the website. A lot of dodgy sites just display a
generic, uninformative set of boiler-plate HTML pages. To me this
says DODGY SITE but ymmv.

Consider what those show to decide whether the site is dodgy or not
and act accordingly.

Thanks. I looked at the site, and it was indeed a faceless generic page
that gave away nothing.
I'll note your process, thanks.
A 'whois' gives some strange information.
--
Davey.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 12:12:52 +0000, Davey wrote:

Thanks. I looked at the site, and it was indeed a faceless generic page
that gave away nothing.
I'll note your process, thanks.
A 'whois' gives some strange information.

'whois' is only occasionally useful these days.

It used to be an essential tool, back when you could use it to find
contact details for a site's sysadmins if they weren't published on their
web page. That changed when blackhats started using it to find spam
targets. As a result most of the info about a domain name owner
disappeared from view thanks to decisions made by ICANN back in the
noughties and their failure to design and implement a secure replacement, apparently because that would have cost money and reduced operating
PROFITS.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)