Fax Spam, Again, Really?
Due to a large number of reports claiming excessive amounts of MyFax spam from an unknown sender, we decided to get to the bottom of it.
An alarming number of our clients have recently been complaining of MyFax spam being sent by the dozen either from their own address or from an unknown sender. With a little bit of digging we were able to get to the bottom of this annoying problem once and for all.
According to this blog, the links contained in the fax are actually poorly constructed malware. I’m assuming that the senders figure that if they send enough we will eventually open them in attempt to find the origin of the annoyance. Well we didn’t fall for their old tricks – we didn’t open them. Instead we scanned them because we are responsible computer users!
It is worth mentioning that just because it appears that you are sending spam to yourself, it does not mean your account is hacked. Alternatively, if a friend or co-worker mentions that they have been receiving spam with your address this probably means that you have been hacked and need to take appropriate action.
The method of replacing a sender’s address with a false address is known as ‘spoofing’.
The site associated with the spam -MyFax.com – has an area to report spam, but following many failed attempts to reach someone in their support team, I honestly wouldn’t recommend it. Their site looks respectable enough but because there hasn’t been any content added since 2011 I wouldn’t trust the site as a whole.
This still leaves the problem of how to get the faxes to stop. We recommend the following actions:
- Do not open any links or attachments. Not even the ‘no spam request’ tab.
- Report the spam to your email provider.
- Set up an SPF record inside of your DNS management for the domain.
*Note: An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Server record that allows users to limit the IPs they connect with. By identifying which email servers you would like to receive communications from you can limit the amount of spam. In other words, by adjusting your SPF records you can set your DNS to only send mail from the corresponding email server’s IP. As a result, spamming will not send at all.
Instructions on how to set up an SPF record:
Log in to your control panel and select ‘domains’ —> ‘DNS’ —> ‘show advanced DNS settings’.
You should see a TXT field to add a SPF record.
The following is an SPF version 1 record as a TXT record.
Enter your domain in the ‘host’ section.
Copy and paste the following TXT into the field.
“v=spf1 a mx ip4:216.40.44.0/24 -all”
*Note: This action should prevent all spoofing from your domain, not only MyFax spam. Take that spammers!
If at any time you should need assistance setting your SPF records please contact our 24x7x365 support team at chi.UK2.net