Generally speaking, if you start getting spam to an email address, therre are a few possibilities:
- The spammers found it on a Web site, forum, or email group.
- The spammers found it by doing a dictionary attack.
- You used it on a Web site or online ordering system that was hacked.
- You gave it to someone who gave, sold, or rented it to the spammers.
- You gave it to someone who was then hacked.
- You gave it to someone who is infected with an email-scraping virus.
If this email was created only for Smith Micro, that rules out the first two possibilities, leaving only the bottom four. Smith Micro probably didn't intentionally sell it on to phishers, which means they have been hacked, they are using a computer infected with a virus, or the spammers found the email address by using a brute-force dictionary attack.
How unusual is the email address? Does it use dictionary words?
