Bobbear suffers from obscene Joe Job attack

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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Last week we described how a voluntary website set up to spread information about money laundering scams was suffering from a distributed denial-of-service attack, presumably instigated by the very people that it tries to warn people about.

Today we discover that Bobbear.co.uk is suffering from a new attack – this time in the form of a Joe Job email attack, attempting to discredit the name of the site and its owner Bob Harrison by sending highly offensive messages.

Here is a small sample of the offensive email messages being spammed out, fraudulently claiming to come from Bobbear.co.uk:

Bobbear Joe Job email examples

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The result of messages like this is not just that Bobbear’s good name is brought into disrepute, but also that the good people at Bobbear receive thousands and thousands of bouncebacks when emails fail to be delivered, clogging their inboxes.

It’s clear to me that the bad guys aren’t too happy with Bobbear.co.uk spreading information about their internet scams, and are retaliating by attempting to smear the name of the website and strike it with distributed denial-of-service attacks. Our friends at Bobbear, who volunteer their time without payment to assist the internet community, don’t deserve this – and could probably benefit from others mirroring the excellent content on their site to make these kinds of attacks less succesful in future.

Long time readers of the Sophos website will remember that this is not the first time that Bobbear has been targeted by the bad guys. In October last year, Sophos reported how a group of internet criminals were attempting to tarnish the name of the Bobbear website with another Joe Job attack, pretending to be messages asking for donations.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "The AI Fix" and "Smashing Security" podcasts. Follow him on Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

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