I had planned to get some more information out from M3AAWG sessions last week, including the Gmail session and the ISP session. But, I am still catching up with other work.
I will say this, though, implementing a preference center will not solve delivery problems when you are sending from an IP with no reverseDNS.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will have content. (Stop laughing. Really. Just stop)
A little late, but I’ve been in sessions most of today. M3AAWG announced this morning that Brian Krebs won the 2014 Mary Litynski award. This award is given to people who work tirelessly to make the internet a better place.
I first had the pleasure of listening to Brian give the keynote address at a MAAWG conference many years ago. His ability to infiltrate some major spam operations and online forums for criminals is amazing. He’s also had retaliation attempts, including being SWATed and having heroin delivered to his house.
If you get a chance to hear Brian speak, I strongly encourage you to do so. His knowledge is outstanding and his speaking style is entertaining. I’ve learned a lot from Brian over the years and I’m pleased he won this award and that M3AAWG recognized his contribution to stopping abuse online.
M3AAWG press release
The M3AAWG keynote address today was a talk from Ladar Levinson about the shut down of Lavabit mail service after receiving demands from the NSA to hand over their SSL keys.
@maawg tweeted different quotes from the session. There is a conflict between privacy and security, and these are questions we need to resolve.
Ladar talked about his potential new service called darkmail, which pushes encryption back to the user level. I think there is relevance to this, as many online services are used for political and other organizing. As someone said to me last night, some of the people using our service could be killed if we don’t protect their privacy. He wasn’t speaking of the US residents, but people in places like Ukraine or Arab countries or other places undergoing violent revolutions.
Privacy is important, how we treat privacy is important. Handing over SSL keys to governments strikes me as a big problem.
Spammers have been moving into the phone market for a long time. Just recently security firms have discovered an Android botnet. This botnet sends viruses over SMS, and when a link in the SMS is clicked, the phone is infected with the virus which then sends more SMS.
The technology for blocking and reporting SMS spam is comparable to email blocking technology 10 or 12 years ago. There just aren’t many tools for people to use to control this spam. M3AAWG is addressing mobile spam, but it still seems that the volumes are increasing without much recourse. Even the 7726 reporting number doesn’t seem to stop the spam (nor remove per-text charges).
At least in the beginning of the email spam problem, we didn’t have botnets. Now, at the beginning of the curve for SMS spam, we already have self replicating botnets. I’m afraid the good guys might be behind on this issue.
Then again I might just be cranky because SMS spammers woke us up at 4:30 am.
Infoworld article
TNW article
PCWorld article