Spam

Whose Network Is It?

A reader sent me a link last week to a piece that doesn't speak highly of net neutrality. Clyde Wayne Crews wrote an article called "Dumb Pipes, a Dumb Idea: Net Neutrality as 21st Century Socialism" that calls for legislators to reject "nut" neutrality. "Elevating the principle of mandatory net neutrality above the principle of investor ownership and wealth creation in pipes and spectrum deflects market forces away from the infrastructure development that we need..." Did anyone else see a touch of irony in a letter to the editor... more

Privacy Rules to Change in the EU, But What If ...?

In a presentation EU Commissioner Viviane Reding gave a preview of the new Privacy regulation her DG is preparing. As she states, privacy rules need to be brought up to date and harmonized. With all 27 member states having the same rules and tools to enforce, a company only will deal with one privacy commissioner... So, what if we, for the sake of this blog, take this initiative towards spam and cyber crime. What would this do to spam enforcement? more

Coders, Crackers and Bots, Oh My!

There are more than just blue, black and white hat hackers. There are a few more types of folks out there that don't fit into the above categories. This article is taken from Stratfor with some commentary by myself... Many of the hackers described in my previous post are also coders, or "writers," who create viruses, worms, Trojans, bot protocols and other destructive "malware" tools used by hackers... more

Real. Or. Phish?

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

Cyber Security and the White House

A few months ago, an article appeared on arstechnica.com asking the question "Should cybersecurity be managed from the White House?" During the recent presidential elections in the United States and the federal elections in Canada, the two major players in both parties had differing views that crossed borders. In the US, the McCain campaign tended to favor free market solutions to the problem of cybersecurity, and the Conservatives in Canada took a similar position... more

How to Steal Reputation

The term "reputation hijacking" continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press. It's intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else's system -- usually one of the large webmail providers -- to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they're hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider's IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new... more

Spammer Convicted on Wire Fraud Charges - United States v. Diamreyan

Earlier this year Okpako Mike Diamreyan was found guilty of wire fraud. The district court recently denied his motion for judgment of acquittal. Diamreyan "was charged with devising a scheme to defraud known as an 'advance fee.'" As the court describes it, this is a "scam . . . where a person asks an individual to pay an advance fee in order to obtain a larger sum of money, which the individual [victim] never receives." ... Two things about the case struck me... more

Report On National Online Cybercrime and Online Threats Reporting Centres

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

Spam from Mobile Networks? Who Woulda Thought…

Mobile networks aren't usually thought of as sources of spam, but a quick look at some of the resources that track spam reveals they actually are. This is counter intuitive at first glance because when most people think of mobile they think of smartphones, and those aren't known to be sources of spam (at least not yet). What's really going on is PCs connected to mobile networks with air cards, or tethered with a smartphone where it's permissible, are the culprits more

Why the Fukushima Analogy Was Apt

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

The Distribution of Botnets Since Rustock Went Down

I pulled together some statistics on my collection of botnet statistics for the period of time between Rustock being shut down and Wednesday, April 6. I wanted to see the distribution of botnets per country - now that Rustock is down, which country has the most botnet infections (as measured by unique IP addresses that send us spam)? more

Who Is Sending Email As Your Company?

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

Worming Our Way Out of Trouble

The Conficker worm will be active again on April 1st, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA. This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member ‘botnet’ of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm’s as yet unidentified authors. more

Searching for Truth in DKIM: Part 1 of 5

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

Resources for Cleaning Your Network

The first step (but certainly not the last) towards saving the internet from spam, malware, and other abuse is to keep your own network clean. A friend of CAUCE, who wishes to remain anonymous, offers these tips and resources to help you identify problem traffic emanating from your network, and clean it up. Though primarily written for ISPs, many of the items below should apply equally well to any network owner. more