We have received reports from some clients that a spam e-mail regarding
information on the security EQTD.PK, has been targeted to an address
they use with Ameritrade. This is not a result of Ameritrade sharing or
selling any contact information, nor do we believe any information has
been compromised. The cornerstone of our Privacy Statement is the
commitment to keep our clients? personal information confidential.
Ameritrade does not sell, license, lease or otherwise disclose your personal
information to any third party for any reason, except as noted in the
Privacy Statement.
Several Spam methods do not depend on using purchased or intercepted
lists of existing or valid e-mail accounts. Spammers also use known
"brute forcing" or dictionary techniques. Brute forcing e-mails basically
starts with something like
a@doeinvestor.net,
aa@doeinvestor.net,
aaa@doeinvestor.net,
aab@doeinvestor.net,
abb@doeinvestor.net and
continues on from there. Brute forcing basically generates and sends out an
e-mail to every possible combination of characters/email addresses at
any given domain. A dictionary e-mail spam basically uses all of the
words that would be included in a dictionary or combinations of words
which generally produce quite a few valid e-mail accounts. This type of
method would not be inhibited by using a separate e-mail address for
each business account you may have.
We have identified the ISP that these e-mails originated from and our
Legal Department has taken the appropriate action to address and
prohibit further spam attempts.
We have no reason to believe that any of our systems have been
compromised. Ameritrade deploys state of the art firewalls, intrusion
detection, anti - virus software as well as employs a full time staff of
employee?s dedicated strictly to Information Security and protecting
Ameritrade's systems from unauthorized access.
