Steve’s been busy this week working on some new products.
You can see the first at Did Company Leak? This is a neat little hack that looks at social media reports to see if a there are reports of leaks, breaches or hacks and gives you a list of tweets that reference them. And, yes, I did really receive spam to two addresses stolen from iContact customers today.
In all the recent discussions of email address thievery I’ve not seen anyone mention stealing addresses by abusing the legal system. And, yet, there’s at least one ambulance chasing lawyer that’s using email addresses that were never given to him by the recipients. Even worse, when asked about it he said that the courts told him he could use the email address and that we recipients had no recourse.
I’m not sure the spammer is necessarily wrong, but it’s a frustrating situation for both the recipient and the company that had their address list stolen.
A few years ago, law firm of Bursor and Fisher filed a host of class action lawsuits against various wireless carriers, including AT&T. At one point during the AT&T lawsuit the judge ruled that AT&T turn over their customer list, including email addresses, to Bursor and Fisher. Bursor and Fisher were then to send notices to all the AT&T subscribers notifying them of the suit.
This is not unreasonable. Contacting consumers by email to notify them of legal action makes a certain amount of sense.
But then Bursor and Fisher took it a step further. They looked at all these valid email addresses and decided they could use this for their own purposes. They started mailing advertisements to the AT&T wireless list.
The Online Trust Alliance has published a security framework for ESPs.
Overall, I think it’s a useful starting point. I don’t agree with all of their suggestions. Some of them are expensive and provide little increase in security. While others decrease security, like the suggestion to force regular password changes.
I think the most important part of the document is the question section. The key to effective security measures is understanding threats. Answering the self assessment questions and thinking about internal processes will help identify potential threats and their vectors.
The document is not a panacea, and even companies that implement all of their recommendations will still be open to attacks from other avenues. But it certainly is a very good way to open the security discussion.
You’re going to be seeing a lot of discussion about email addresses stolen from ESPs in the next few days, if you haven’t already. There are a lot of interesting things to discuss about that from an email perspective – from “Why two factor authentication isn’t a magic bullet.” to “And this is why corporate spam folders can be a major security risk.”
We could have fodder for blog content for weeks!
Right now I’m just going to look at one of the reasons why it’s worth stealing a list of email addresses from an ESP or a list owner, rather than just gathering them from other sources. That is, why the ESPs and list owners are high value targets beyond just “that’s where the email addresses are“.
If you steal a list of addresses from a list owner, or a bunch of lists from an ESP, you have one very useful extra piece of information about the recipients beyond the usual name-and-email-address. You know a company that the recipient is already expecting to receive email from.
That means that you know someone you can pretend to be in order to get a recipient to open and respond to a malicious email you send them – which will make an attempt to phish someones credentials or compromise their computer via email much more likely to be effective.
A good example of targeted phishing for credentials is the online game World of Warcraft. There’s a huge criminal underground that makes real world money by selling game money to players. The main thing the gold sellers need to have to be able to acquire game money, advertise their services to players and to give game money to players in return for dollars is an endless series of World of Warcraft accounts. Blizzard, the World of Warcraft owner, work reasonably hard to squash those accounts and make it slightly tricky for the gold sellers to sign up for them, so stealing account credentials from existing users is a great way to get them. And you can also strip those accounts bare of in-game possessions and gold in the process.
Some of the phishing is done in the game itself, where you know that everyone has an account you can steal if you can just get them to visit your website and compromise their machine…