After Epsilon lost a bunch of customer lists, I've been keeping an eye open to see if any of the vendors I work with had any of my email addresses stolen -- not least because it'll be interesting to see where this data ends up. Recently I got mail from Marriott, telling me that "unauthorized third party gained access to a number of Epsilon's accounts including Marriott's email list."... more
Google in partnership with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, has published the results of a multi-year study that measured how email security has evolved since 2013. Although Gmail was the foundation of the research, insights from the study are believed to be applicable to email more broadly. more
Do you know someone who has played a major role in the development and advancement of the Internet? Now is the time to recognize their contribution. Nominate them for the 2019 Internet Hall of Fame. With more than 100 inductees, the Internet Hall of Fame celebrates Internet pioneers and innovators who have pushed the boundaries to bring the Internet to life and make it an essential resource for billions of people today. more
As far as facebook is concerned, your email is your identification. This is true for other social networks like linkedin, and is slowly catching on to many other Web 2.0 services. It actually makes a lot of sense that your unique identifier (your "ID") would be your email -- it's unique by definition, it's easy to remember and most services need the email information anyway... So if email is destined to become the equivalent of your social security number or identification number (depending on which country you live in) how do we proof check that the email address we typed does not contain any typos? more
If you have already adopted AI in your small or mid-size organization, congratulations. If not, the urgency of adopting should be a top priority. You will become a laggard and most likely obsolete given the supercycle of innovation we are currently in. Implementing AI is quite different from other organization-wide strategies because it involves highly specific characteristics and expert resource pools that SMBs might not be able to access. more
Today I released a report on 'National cyber crime and online threats reporting centres. A study into national and international cooperation'. Mitigating online threats and the subsequent enforcing of violations of laws often involves many different organisations and countries. Many countries are presently engaged in erecting national centres aimed at reporting cyber crime, spam or botnet mitigation. more
CDA Section 230 has been called "The 26 Words that Created the Internet". While it is obvious how Sec 230 protects the World Wide Web, it is equally important for e-mail. A recent Pennsylvania court case emphasizes this point. Dr. Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, forwarded an article about another professor Dr. Monge to an online e-mail discussion list. Dr. Monge claimed the article was defamatory and sued Dr. Thomas, the university, and many others. more
A few days ago, CAUCE published a blog post entitled "Epsilon Interactive breach the Fukushima of the Email Industry" on our site, and the always-excellent CircleID. A small coterie of commenters was upset by the hyperbolic nature of the headline. Fair enough, an analogy usually has a high degree of probability that it will fail, and clearly, no one has died as a result of the release of what appears to be tens of millions of people's names and email addresses. But, the two situations are analogous in many other ways, and here's why. more
You might expect that the IT department or security team knows who's sending email using your company's domains. But for a variety of reasons these groups are often unaware of many legitimate senders -- not to mention all the bad actors. Fortunately you can get a more complete view by using DMARC's reporting features. How does it happen? Product teams managing a new product launch or customer survey hire marketing consultants and Email Service Providers (ESP)... more
In the previous instalment we looked at the software changes needed for mail servers to handle internationalized mail, generally abbreviated as EAI. When a message arrives, whether ASCII or EAI, mail servers generally drop it into a mailbox and let the user pick it up. The usual ways for mail programs to pick up mail are POP3 and IMAP4. more
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the leading email authentication technology, supported by major ISPs including Google, AOL, and Yahoo! (who invented its predecessor), popular mail server software like Sendmail, and many of the best minds in email technology. But if you peruse the archives of the IETF DKIM mailing list, or start up a conversation at MAAWG, it might appear that there's still a lot of disagreement about what a DKIM signature actually means. more
Neil Schwartzman writes to report: "Ken Magill covers the current rake fight on the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group mailing list concerning anti-spam DNS Blacklist, or Blocklist, (DNSBL) operators charging for delistings, that is well worth a read, he has quotes from many experts and leaders in the industry who are decidedly against the practice." more
There are a number of things that make a responsible Email Service Provider (ESP), including setting and enforcing standards higher than those set by the ISPs. One of the responsible ESPs is Mailchimp. (Full disclaimer, I do consult for Mailchimp.) This ESP focuses on businesses with small to medium sized lists. They screen new customers for source of permission as well as mail content. more
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), of which Return Path (my employer) is a very active participant, met recently in Heidelberg, Germany. Among other exciting projects, they finished two new best practices documents which have been lauded in the press as a big step towards stopping botnet spam... more
Phishing researcher Gary Warner's always interesting blog offers some fresh perspective on clicking links on emails, as the crux of the phishing problem. Gary writes: "There is a saying 'if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself for a lifetime.' In the case of the Epsilon email breach the saying might be 'if you teach a man to be phished, he'll be a victim for a lifetime.' In order to illustrate my point, let's look at a few of the security flaws in the business model of email-based marketing, using Epsilon Interactive and their communications as some examples." more
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