Username Perils

WARNING: GEEKEY ENTRY

Ok for those of you don’t know I like to think of myself as an internet pioneer, well I first had the internet at home in November 1996.

When my family first signed up to the internet my brother and I were reading the pamphlet we got from On Australia (A partnership between Telstra and Microsoft which broke up and became BigPond). In the pamphlet it stated "Your email address will be username@onaustralia.com.au", we decided to take this literally, as a joke. (Yes we knew we were meant to choose a username and replace the "username" part of the e-mail address with the one we chose, but we could not resist being complete tools. Fortunately due to our early entry to the internet this username was available, so we became username@onaustralia.com, and later on got the Bigpond and Telstra domain equivalents.

Having this email address was a really good novelty, especially when ringing up for tech support. The poor person on the end of the phone would get quite flustered by me trying to tell them my username is “username” and the support person believing that I don’t know what a username is. (A hint for all of the username buddies out there, spell it to them letter by letter)

Anyway, the novelty wore off when I started getting lots of emails from people and especially wore off when mass mailing worms and Trojans hit the scene. At this point in time I was getting a couple of hundred 100K payload emails per day. Bigpond were no help in solving this issue at all so to solve this I did not check my mail anymore.

A couple of months back I received an e-mail from one of my lectures telling me that I could use the universities Symantec Corporate Virus Scanner for free. This, coupled with the fact that I have DSL with ample reaming usage allowance to spare, meant that I can now download all of my mail and have my virus scanner delete all of the e-mails with viruses in them. (Yes I have tried other virus scanners, but they are so obtrusive and don’t do everything in the background like Symantec does)

Now the latest fun thing that is happening to me is that I am getting multiple (about 30 so far) e-mails from Bigpond customers who have just got broadband and want to have a simular email addresses to their dialup accounts. Now a couple of these emails have contained with people’s usernames AND PASSWORDS! How stupid can people be!

Up to this point in time I have just been ignoring these e-mails, however tonight I received this email (particulars removed):

"I would like to retain my old dial-up user name ********@bigpond.com and have a password of ********

Have installed Broadband today using username ******** and password *********

When requesting installation kit I indicated that my wife's computer would be a subset of mine as it was on dial up and agreed to the extra fee. Does her username need to be changed? which is currently ******** and password *********. Thankyou, *********."

After a while I decided to reply to this email telling the sender of the fact that I am not Bigpond tech support and they should not be sending out their password and username to a complete stranger. I cannot wait to find out what happens!!! In the hour that has passed I have received about a dozen virus e-mails but no reply. I'll keep you all posted with the results.