the russians are back

About four years ago I was getting a huge volume of backscatter email to the non-existent address info@baldric.net. After a month or so it started to go quiet and eventually I got hardly any hits on that (or any other) address. A couple of weeks or so ago they came back. My logs for weeks ending 15 March, 22 March and 29 March show 92%, 96% and 94% respectively of all email to my main mail server is failed connection attempts from Russian domains to dear old non-existent “info”. Out of curiosity I decided to capture some of the inbound mails. Most were in Russian, but the odd one or two were in (broken) english. Below is a typical example:

From: “Olga”
To: Subject: Are you still looking for love? Look at my photos!
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2015 15:22:08 +0300
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Live Mail 16.4.3528.331

Sunshine!
Are you still looking for love? I will be very pleased to become your half and save you from loneliness. My name is Olga, 25 years old.
For now I live in Russia, but it’s a bad time in my country, and I think about moving to another state.
I need a safer place for life, is your country good for that?
If you are interested and want to get in touch with me, just look at this international dating site.
Hope to see you soon!
Just click here!

Sadly, I believe that many recipients of such emails will indeed, “click here”. Certainly enough to further propagate whatever malware was used to compromise the end system which actually sent the above email.