[Itshim]

Originally Posted by Qtx

If you genuinely only used that email address for the Virgin site and never gave it to anyone else or used it anywhere, there are a few options as to how a spammer could have it.

Your pc/whatever could have gotten infected and the email gotten from your browsers saved logins or malware could have sent it to its owners as you typed/entered it it in to a login form on a website.

Sometimes there are tricks to enumerate valid users from email servers or simply brute force which ones are valid by reading the servers response.

The mail server or Virgin site you signed up could have been compromised and all the email addresses exfiltrated. There have been some nasty exploits for a common mail server in 2020 and also some Apache Struts/Adobe AEM/Some other Adobe web stuff that VM used to was also vulnerable. While they try and filter exploitation using network and waf rules, its far from foolproof.

Lastly, an employee could have taken them to sell/backed them up for legitimate reasons and stored somewhere that got compromised or left on a USB stick that got lost/stolen.

So its never black or white.

Also the spammer may have just CC'ed ntworld addresses together as they know a way past their spam filter without giving up some of their better tricks that they can save for later. That same simple trick might get caught by another ISP's filter so they will be less sure of what percent got through if they sent to multiple email providers at once.

There last week there has been a huge increase in spam everywhere

Not arguing with you at all however the ntl address I use for this site only has been compromised . Understand it's the leak from some years ago block spam as and when I see it . Which is longer ago than I can recall