Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.
This morning I received the first two spams to the address of mine that was compromised during the Epsilon compromise back in April. Actually, I received two of them. One was the “standard” Adobe phish email. The other was similar but referenced Limewire instead of Adobe.
Read MoreAnd that problem is security.
Much of what marketing does is build profiles of customers by collecting huge amounts of data on every customer. That data collection is facilitated by compliant customers that provide all sorts of personal data just because they’re politely asked by a retail clerk.
There will always be people who comply with data requests, but I expect more customers to be wary of sharing information at the register.
I’m not the only one, a recent NY Times blog post from one of their security researchers: Stop asking me for my email address. She discusses how much information companies ask for and how complacently consumers hand it over without asking about security.
I had hoped to move away from security blogging this week and focus on some other issues. But today I see that both CAUCE and John Levine are reporting that there is malware spam coming from a Cheetahmail customer.
Looking at what they shared, it may be that Cheetahmail has not been compromised directly. Given mail is only coming from one /29, which belongs to one customer it is possible that only the single customer account has been compromised. If that is the case, then it’s most likely one of the Cheetahmail users at the customer got infected and their Cheetahmail credentials were stolen. The spammer then gained access to the customer’s Cheetahmail account. It’s even possible that the spammer used the compromised customer account to launch the mail. If this is the case, the spammer looked exactly like the customer, so most normal controls wouldn’t have noticed this was a spammer.
This highlights the multiple vectors these criminals are using to gain access to ESPs and the mailing systems they use. They’re not just trying to compromise the ESPs, but they’re also attempting to compromise customers and access their accounts so that the spammer can steal the ESPs hard won and hard fought sending reputation.
Everyone sending mail should be taking a long, hard look at their security. Just because you’re not an ESP doesn’t mean you aren’t a target or that you can get away with lax security. You are also a target.