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This month I thought I could feel smug, deploying Postfix, with greylisting (Postgrey), and the Spamhaus block list (SBL-XBL) has reduced the volume of unsolicited bulk commercial email one of our servers was delivering to our clients by 98.99%. Alas greylisting is a flawed remedy, it merely requires the spambots to act more like email servers and it will fail, and eventually they will... more
The following is an overview of the recent Honeynet Project and Research Alliance study called 'Know your Enemy:Phishing' aimed at discovering practical information on the practice of phishing. This study focuses on real world incidents based on data captured and analyzed from the UK and German Honeynet Project revealing how attackers build and use their infrastructure for Phishing based attacks. "This data has helped us to understand how phishers typically behave and some of the methods they employ to lure and trick their victims. We have learned that phishing attacks can occur very rapidly, with only limited elapsed time between the initial system intrusion and a phishing web site going online..." more
Larry Seltzer wrote an interesting article for eWeek, on port 25 blocking, the reasons why it was being advocated, and how it would stop spam. This quoted an excellent paper by Joe St.Sauver, that raised several technically valid and true corollaries that have to be kept in mind when blocking port 25 -- "cough syrup for lung cancer" would be a key phrase... Now, George Ou has just posted an article on ZDNET that disagrees with Larry's article, makes several points that are commonly cited when criticizing port 25 blocking, but then puts forward the astonishing, and completely wrong, suggestion, that worldwide SPF records are going to be a cure all for this problem. Here is my reply to him... more
For those who've been living in an e-mail free cave for the past year, phishing has become a huge problem for banks. Every day I get dozens of urgent messages from a wide variety of banks telling me that I'd better confirm my account info pronto. ...Several people have been floating proposals to extend authentication schemes to the URLs in a mail message. A sender might declare that all of links in it are to its own domain, e.g., if the sender is bigbank.com, all of the links have to be to bigbank.com or maybe www.bigbank.com. Current path authentication schemes don't handle this, but it wouldn't be too hard to retrofit into SPF. ...So the question is, is it worth the effort to make all of the senders and URLs match up? more
A recent study conducted by Blue Security reports how Internet users can unknowingly expose their contacts' emails addresses to Spammers while sharing files, music, games and DVDs over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The study has uncovered hundreds of incidents where files containing email addresses were made accessible in P2P networks. more
Now, I don't like the word "whither" any more than you do. But this Reuters article was circulating yesterday and it seemed to call for a "whither." It's a short story, so let's do a close reading. "A U.N.-sponsored panel aims to settle a long-running tug of war for control of the Internet by July and propose solutions to problems such as cyber crime and email spam, panel leaders said on Monday." We're going to decide what "internet governance" is by July? more
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
As a daily and enthusiastic reader of The New York Times, I was disappointed to read their February 1 article on CAN-SPAM entitled, "Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead" (subscription required). The theme of the article was, as the title suggests, that enacting CAN-SPAM was worse than having no laws at all. The article really missed the point on several fronts. more
The following excerpt is from the Free Software Magazine, March 2005 Issue, written by Kirk Strauser. To read the entire article, you may download the magazine here [PDF]. Also thanks to Yakov Shafranovich for making us aware of this publication. "Spam has existed since at least 1978, when an eager DEC sales representative sent an announcement of a product demonstration to a couple hundred recipients. The resulting outcry was sufficient to dissuade most users from repeating the experiment. This changed in the late 1990s: millions of individuals discovered the internet and signed up for inexpensive personal accounts and advertisers found a large and willing audience in this new medium." more
Several anti-spam companies talk about spam volumes in terms of a percentage of all inbound mail. Outsourced anti-spam services such as BlackSpider and Postini are currently quoting spam volumes in the 70%-85% range, having steadily grown over the last two+ years. That's nice, but it's actually hard to grasp what that means in absolute terms. more
In my spare time when I'm not dealing with the world of e-mail, I'm a politician so now and then I put on my cynical political hat. At the FTC Authentication Summit one of the more striking disagreements was about the merits and flaws of SPF and Microsoft's Sender-ID. Some people thought they are wonderful and the sooner we all use them the better. Others thought they are deeply flawed and pose a serious risk of long-term damage to the reliability of e-mail. Why this disagreement over what one might naively think would be a technical question? more
As the year comes to a close, it is important to reflect on what has been one of the major actions in the anti-spam arena this year: the quest for email authentication. With email often called the "killer app" of the Internet, it is important to reflect on any major changes proposed, or implemented that can affect that basic tool that many of us have become to rely on in our daily lives. And, while many of the debates involved myriads of specialized mailing lists, standards organizations, conferences and even some government agencies, it is important for the free and open source software (FOSS) community as well as the Internet community at large, to analyze and learn lessons from the events surrounding email authentication in 2004. more
The recent testing by Gmail of DomainKeys affords an opportunity to look again at what the impact of it may be in any attempt to introduce a Domino addin to verify DomainKeys signatures. I have here a sample of an email sent from Gmail and that same email after being delivered to the in-box of a Notes/Domino user who prefers MIME. There are differences which make DomainKeys a real problem at Domino shops (and, I suspect, others). more
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a case that could have a profound effect on the privacy of Internet communications. The brief argues that the decision in US v. Councilman, soon to be reheard by the full First Circuit, should be overturned. more
The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) conference, a gathering of Internet Service Provider (ISP) engineers and vendors convenes three times a year for mostly technical conversation along with social networking. The recent NANOG conference in Reston Virginia saw some unusually direct talk about Spam and the ISPs that tolerate it from America Online's Postmaster, Charles Stiles. more
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