What's the Scam? Bruce Schneier Investigates a Flood of AI-Generated Thank-Yous
Security expert Bruce Schneier reports receiving a wave of suspiciously similar, AI-generated thank-you emails from Gmail addresses that never subscribed to his newsletter. The messages praise his emails in generic terms, but no one responds to his replies. Schneier is puzzled: what's the endgame? He asks readers for ideas.
But so many, and all at once—this is obviously AI.
- janpeuker
My guess would be it's to build up reputation of the sending accounts, by being "connected" to trusted, aged, accounts? However, the combination of garbled text + number @ large provider on its own should be pretty suspicious by now. Another idea is some kind of affiliate marketing / pumping attack, but I don't see ads.
- rhplus
Kind of out there, but if you were running a network of agents that are autonomously looking for exploits, then perhaps those agents have decided that a good source of fresh ideas might be to periodically receive Schneier’s newsletter in an inbox they control.
- hojofpoj
I have to agree with one of the commenters that it is probably a categorizing stage on a list of scraped blogger emails.