Dumb Spam question, please need help ....

Greetings-

I hope that somebody can help me. I've performed many searches, but don't know specifically what I'm searching for! Here's my dilema ...

My company receives spam addressed to its internal distribution mailbox. So, for example, I'll receive a spam "Hot Housewives" addressed to "COMPANY ABC" or "HR GROUP" or "IT GROUP" or "VP Group" .... not to an individual email address such as "joesmith@companyabc". Individually, each employee has set up spam filters to avoid emails to "joesmith@companyabc" but the emails that are address to the internal group boxes come flying through.

How does this happen and how can it be stopped. We are a 100 person firm and lack knowledgeable IT people to fix this problem. It just seems silly to me ... how can spamers address mail to a group box that in theory would only be accessible internally??

Maybe this is the dumest question ever! So, I apologize in advance if this is the case, but PLEASE HELP ... or may give me a hint of how to properly search for a fix to this issue.

Many thanks!

The group address would be accessible only internally if you set your mail server or the list management software or the spam scanner to block mails from outside world destined to the groups.
This surely does not happen by default.

As for where the spammers got to know the addresses..
If the group names are short then they might have just been generated randomly. Names like "it", "hr", "vp" are easy to come up with.
Also, if any of your workers has the addresses in her Outlook contact list and she's got spyware on her computer.. Well, that's what spyware is there for - to sniff out stuff, including e-mail addresses.