Email

Recent Industry Changes: Internet Standards, ARIN WHOIS Changes, Hotmail Postmaster Pages

Signing Email is now a Draft Standard! Signing email transitioned from a proposed standard to a draft standard (RFC6376 -- one of the new RFCs) over at the IETF a few days ago. The other is RFC6377. Let's go through a brief history of DKIM RFCs to refresh our memories... more

Corporate Espionage in the News: Hilton and the Oil Industry

Is anyone calling espionage by means of computers cyber-espionage yet? I hope not. At least they shouldn't call it cyber war. Two news stories of computerized espionage reached me today. The first, regarding the Oil industry, was sent by Marc Sachs to a SCADA security mailing list we both read. The second, about the hotel industry, was sent by Deb Geisler to science fiction convention runners (SMOFS) mailing list we both read. more

How Spam Has Damaged Mail Forwarding - And Ways to Get Around It

Courtesy forwards have been a standard feature of e-mail systems about as long as there have been e-mail systems. A user moves or changes jobs or something, and rather than just closing the account, the mail system forwards all the mail to the user's new address. Or a user with multiple addresses forwards them all to one place to be able to read all the mail together. Since forwarding is very cheap, it's quite common for forwards to persist for many years. Unfortunately, forwarding is yet another thing that spam has screwed up. more

The Spamhaus Whitelist

For several months I have been working with the Spamhaus project on a whitelist, which we announced to the public this week. While this is hardly the first mail whitelist, our goals are somewhat different from other whitelists. Think of e-mail as ranging from inky black to pearly white... more

Protecting Customer Data

There have been a number of reports recently about customer lists leaking out through Email Service Providers (ESPs). In one case, the ESP attributed the leak to an outside hack. In other cases, the ESPs and companies involved have kept the information very quiet and not told anyone that data was leaked. People do notice, though, when they use single use addresses or tagged addresses and know to whom each address was submitted. Data security is not something that can be glossed over and ignored. more

The FBI and Scotland Yard vs. Anonymous: Security Lessons

A lot of people are fascinated by the news story that Anonymous managed to listen to a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard. Some of the interest is due to marvel that two such sophisticated organizations could be had, some is due to schadenfreude, and some is probably despair: if the bad guys can get at these folks, is anyone safe? more

The EFF and Hanlon’s Razor

The EFF has just posted a shallower than usual deeplink alleging an "email encryption downgrade attack" by ISPs intent on eavesdropping on their customers. They, along with VPN provider Golden Frog, have additionally complained to the FCC reporting this. Here, they've just noticed something that's common across several hotel / airport wifi networks... more

Phishers Increasingly Targeting SaaS and Webmail Services, APWG Reports

According to the latest report from Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) while the total number of conventional, spam-based phishing campaigns declined in 2018, users of software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems and webmail services are increasingly targeted. more

The Naive Arrogance of FUSSPs

Everyone who's been in the e-mail biz long enough knows the term FUSSP, Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, as described in a checklist from Vern Schryver and a form response that's been floating around the net for a decade. FUSSPs fall into two general categories, bad ideas that won't go away, and reasonable ideas that are oversold. more

Protecting Brands from Phishers No Easy Task

Just in case you've been out of the country for the last 12 months, a new scourge is hitting the Internet and the world of email and it's called phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group defines phishing as identity theft "attacks using 'spoofed' e-mails and fraudulent Websites designed to fool recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords..." According to various experts, the incidents of phishing are rising at an alarming rate: there were 13,000 unique phishing attacks in January alone - that's a 42 percent surge over the previous month. The real problem is that phishing works. more

Holomaxx v. Yahoo and MS: The Hearing

I visited Judge Fogel's courtroom this morning to listen to the oral motions in the Holomaxx cases. This is a general impression, based on my notes. Nothing here is to be taken as direct quotes from any participant. Any errors are solely my own. With that disclaimer in mind, let's go. more

One-Click Unsubscription

Unsubscribing from mailing lists is hard. How many times have you seen a message "please remove me from this list," followed by two or three more pointing out that the instructions are in the footer of every message, followed by three or four more asking people to not send their replies to the whole list (all sent to the whole list, of course,) perhaps with a final message by the list manager saying she's dealt with it? more

Helping Banks Fight Phishing and Account Fraud, Whether They Like It or Not

On Wednesday, Project Honey Pot filed an unusual lawsuit against "John Does stealing money from US businesses through unauthorized electronic transfers made possible by computer viruses transmitted in spam." Their attorney is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, who is one of the most experienced anti-spam lawyers around, with whom I have worked in the past. more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

DMARC and Message Wrapping

I have groused at length about the damage that anti-phishing technique DMARC does to e-mail discussion lists. For at least two years list managers and list software developers have been trying to figure out what to do about it. The group that brought us DMARC is working on an un-DMARC-ing scheme called ARC, which will likely help somewhat, but ARC isn't ready yet, and due to ARC's complexity, it's likely that there will be many medium or small mail systems that enforce DMARC and can't or won't use ARC. more