The university allows URLs as a “person name”, so the spammer bots filled forms everywhere filling with my email and the spam URL as my name. So i’m getting bombarded by “legit” emails with a spam url as in “hi SPAM_URL”
If you’re getting flooded with emails from legitimate sites asking for email address confirmation or password resets, you may be getting hit with a “registration bomb.”
If you have something compromised, they’ll do this to try and hide the email you should actually be worried about in a flood of email that isn’t stopped by the spam filters because they’re from legitimate sources.
I recently woke up to thousands of emails about newsletter registrations, password reset requests, free trial notices, etc. Amongst the deluge of unwanted email was a notification about a new user being added to my PayPal account. If I hadn’t read through the emails I would have lost a lot of money.
I think this is a tactic scammers use to make you miss some other important email like online purchases. I’d comb through those emails carefully if I were you.
Now i’m getting tons of “Dear SPAM_URL, thanks for confirming your attendance at the conference”…
Might be worth letting the uni know. Surely they’ll want to fix the site!