This is, of course, about the recent NYT article that showcases the results of Prof Stefan Savage and his colleagues from UCSD/Berkeley. As my good friend and longtime volunteer at CAUCE, Ed Falk, points out, this is a great find, but hardly a FUSSP. The nice thing about the fight against bots and spammers is these little victories people on "our" side keep having in an endless series of skirmishes and battles... more
A common acronym in spam-fighting is FUSSP -- Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem. It's used (usually derisively) to describe the latest proposed scheme to end spam once and for all. Usually these schemes are based on false assumptions or have already been tried with no results. This time - be still, my beating heart - it looks like some researchers at the University of California might really be on to something. more
At the ENISA presentation on her botnet report at eco in Cologne, 9 and 10 March, one of the slots was dedicated to threats to the mobile environment. The message I was supposed to come home with was: we can still count the numbers of mobile viruses manually, <600; the problem will never be the same as on a fixed network as traffic is monitored and metered: We detect it straight away. We are studying the problem seriously. Are mobile operators really prepared for what is coming? more
It's been a very bad month for ESPs, companies that handle bulk mailings for their clients. Several of them have had internal security breaches, leaking client information, client mailing lists, or both. Many have also seen clients compromised, with the compromised credentials used to send spam. The sequence of events suggests all the ESPs whose clients were compromised were themselves compromised first. (That's how the crooks knew who to attack.) more
In a tweet, EU commissioner for the Information Society Neelie Kroes congratulates OPTA on the spam fine for the golf ball printing company Backsound. Since 2004 the Dutch OPTA is the number one spam and malware fighter of the EU with a total of €1.9 million in fines. It made me ask two question to myself: How come that we seldom hear of other spam fines in the EU? And can the EU change this in any way? more
Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let's take a look at the problem here. We basically have three ways to address spam, in our goal of reducing the amount of spam in our inboxes... more
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
Over at Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins has a post up where she talks about the real problem with ESPs and their lack of internal security procedures which resulted in the breach of many thousands of email addresses (especially Epsilon). However, Atkins isn't only criticizing ESP's lack of security but also the industry's response wherein they have suggested countermeasures that are irrelevant to the problem. 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
NameSmash has interviewed Garth Bruen, Internet security expert and creator of Knujon, on some key issues under discussion during the recent ICANN meetings in San Francisco. Topics include Whois, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) -- issues of critical importance particularly with ICANN's expected roll-out of thousands of new gTLDs in the coming years. more
A series of attacks on the Email Service Provider (ESP) community began in late 2009. The criminals spear-phish their way into these companies that provide out-sourced mailing infrastructure to their clients, who are companies of all types and sizes. ... On March 30, the Epsilon Interactive division of Alliance Data Marketing (ADS on NASDAQ) suffered a massive breach that upped the ante, substantially. Email lists of at least eight financial institutions were stolen. more
Josh Baer, former VP of Datran Media and current CEO of OtherInBox has been floating an idea at the DMA's Email Experience Council and a few other places, and recently got some traction in Ken Magill's Magill Report. What Josh is proposing is to create the technical means by which a Sender can decide when email 'expires' and is automatically removed from a recipient's inbox, either by deletion, or perhaps archiving (in the case of Gmail). This would supposedly help the end-user, by removing marketing offers that are no longer available. Why this idea shouldn't happen... more
The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) published a draft for an Overview of Email DNSBL Best Practices. We can take a step back and review paragraph 2.2.5 (Conflict of Interest)... Some DNSBLs used for blocking/negative reputation have had a practice of requiring fees or donations to charities from the listee for delisting. It is generally considered entirely appropriate for a DNSBL to charge for access to it by its users -- the definition of a commercial DNSBL. more
It's easy to look at Amazon SES and sigh. Thousands of low-end customers sending mail from a shared IP pool? Amazon already knows that trick never works! Just one spammer will ruin the reputation of those IP addresses, resulting in ongoing delivery problems for everyone who uses the service. It is possible that Amazon can build the systems and human processes to keep spammers out; certainly sounds like they want to. more
I started hearing various people comment about lower spam volumes sometime in mid December. This isn't that unusual, spam volumes are highly variable and someone is always noticing that their spam load is going up or going down. The problem is extrapolating larger trends from a small selection of email addresses. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.