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Are you ready for the next attack?

ESPs are under attack and being tested. But I’m not sure much progress in handling and responding to the attacks has been made since the Return Path warning or the Epsilon compromise.
Last week a number of email marketers became aware that attacks against ESPs and senders were ongoing. The shock and surprise many people exhibited prompted my Spear Phishing post on Friday.
The first round of phishing went out on Wednesday, by Friday they were coming from a different ESP. Whether this was a compromised ESP customer or employee it doesn’t matter. ESPs should have reaction plans in place to deal with these threats.
It’s been months since the first attacks. This is more than enough time to have implemented some response to reports of attacks. Yet, many people I talked to last week had no idea what they should or could be doing to protect themselves and their customers.
Last time the attacks were publicly discussed I was frustrated with many of the “how to respond” posts because few of them seemed to address the real issue. People seemed to be pushing agendas that had nothing to do with actually fixing the security holes. There were lots of recommendations to sign all mail with DKIM, implement 2 factor authentication, deploy validation certificates on web properties, or adhere to sender’s best practices.
None of those recommendations actually addressed the gaping security hole: Humans.

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New security focused services

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.

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The weak link in security

Terry Zink posts about the biggest problem with security: human errors. Everyone who is looking at security needs to think about the human factor. And how people can deliberately or accidentally subvert security.

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