M3AAWG published a letter to the FCC addressing the implementation of CSRIC III Cybersecurity Best Practices (pdf link)
The takeaway is that of the ISPs that contribute data to M3AAWG (37M+ users), over 99% of infected users receive notification that they are infected.
I hear from senders occasionally that they are not the problem, bots are the problem and why isn’t anyone addressing bots. The answer is that people are addressing the bot problem.
Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs.
He’s right.
I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on their behalf and “tell the ISP we’re really not a spammer”. My normal answer is that I can, but that there isn’t a place in the spam filtering process for “sender has hired Laura and she says they’re not a spammer.” I mean, it would be totally awesome if that was the case. But it’s not. It’s even the case where I’m close friends with folks inside the ISPs.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before about being at a party with one of the Hotmail ISP folks. There was a sender that had hired me to deal with some Hotmail issues and I’d been working with Barry H. (name changed, and he’s not at Hotmail any more) to resolve it. During the course of the party, we started talking shop. Barry told me that he was sure that my client was sending opt-in mail, but that his users were not reacting well for it. He also told me there was no way he could override the filters because there wasn’t really a place for him to interfere in the filtering.
Even when folks inside the ISPs were willing and able to help me, they usually wouldn’t do so just because I asked. They might look at a sender on my request, but they wouldn’t adjust filters unless the sender met their standards.
These days? ISPs are cutting their non-income producing departments to the bone, and “sender services” is high up the list of departments to cut. Most of the folks I know have moved on from the ISP to the ESP side. Ken mentions one ISP rep that is now working for a sender. I actually know of 3, and those are just employees from the top few ISPs who are now at fairly major ESPs. I’m sure there are a lot more than that.
The reality is, you can have the best relationships in the world with ISPs, but that won’t get bad mail into the inbox. Filters don’t work that way anymore. That doesn’t mean relationships are useless, though. Having relationships at ISPs can get information that can shorten the process of fixing the issue. If an ISP says “you are blocked because you’re hitting spam traps” then we do data hygiene. If the ISP says “you’re sending mail linking to a blocked website” then we stop linking to that website.
I have a very minor quibble with one thing Ken said, though. He says “no one has a relationship with Spamhaus volunteer, they’re all anonymous.” This isn’t exactly true. Spamhaus volunteers do reveal themselves. Some of them go around openly at MAAWG with nametags and affiliations. A couple of them are colleagues from my early MAPS days. Other do keep their identities secret, but will reveal them to people they trust to keep those identities secret. Or who they think have already figured it out. There was one drunken evening at MAAWG where the nice gentleman I was joking with leaned over and says “You know I am elided from Spamhaus, right?” Uh. No? I didn’t. I do now!
But even though I have the semi-mythical personal relationship with folks from Spamhaus, it doesn’t mean my clients get preferential treatment. My clients get good advice, because I know what Spamhaus is looking for and can translate their requirements into solid action steps for the client to perform. But I can think of half a dozen ESP delivery folks that have the same sorts of relationships with Spamhaus volunteers.
Overall, relationships are valuable, but they are not sufficient to fix inbox delivery problems.
Your entire work life is in your work mail client.
All the people you communicate with – co-workers, friends, family, vendors, customers, colleagues.
Every email you send. Every email you receive. Any files you attach or receive.
If someone can compromise your mail client, they can see all that.
They can save copies of all your emails, data-mine them and use them for whatever purpose they like. They can build a view of your social network, based on who you exchange emails with, and a model of who you are, based on what you talk about.
That companies like Google do this for “free”, advertising supported webmail shouldn’t be much of a surprise by now – but your corporate email system and your work email is secure, right?
What if an attacker were to set up a man-in-the-middle attack on your employees? Install malware on their iPhone, such that all traffic were transparently routed through a proxy server controlled by the attacker?
Or they could use a more email-centric approach, configuring the compromised mail client to fetch mail from an IMAP server controlled by the attacker that took the employees credentials and passed them through to their real corporate IMAP server – that would let the attacker completely control what the compromised user saw in their inbox. As well as being able to read all mail sent to that user, they could silently filter mail, they could deliver new mail to the users inbox directly, bypassing any mail filters or security. They could even modify the contents of email on-the-fly – adding tracking links, redirection URLs or injecting entirely new content into the message.
Similarly, the attacker could route all outbound mail through a man-in-the-middle smarthost that copied the users credentials and used them to send mail on to their real corporate smarthost. As well as being able to read and modify all mail sent the attacker could also use that access to send mail that masqueraded as coming from the user.
Sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect from criminal malware? Not quite. What I’ve just described is Intro, a new product from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will be asking your users to click on a link to install a “security profile” to their iPhones. If they do, then LinkedIn will have total control over the phone, and will use that to inject their SMTP and IMAP proxies into your users mailstreams. The potential for abuse by LinkedIn themselves is bad enough – I’ve no doubt that they’ll be injecting adverts for themselves into the mailstream, and their whole business is based on monetizing information they acquire about employees and their employers. But LinkedIn have also been compromised in the past, with attackers stealing millions of LinkedIn user credentials – if they can’t protect their own users credentials, I wouldn’t trust them with your employees credentials.
You might want to monitor where your employees are logging in to your servers from – and suspend any accounts that log in from LinkedIn network space.
Edit: Bishop Fox has looked at Intro too, and come to similar conclusions. TechCrunch too.
This time it appears that DNS for major websites, including the NY Times, has been compromised. Attackers put in DNS entries that redirected visitors to a malware site. The compromise has been fixed and the fake DNS entries corrected.
However, people may still have the old data in their DNS caches and security experts are suggesting everyone flush their DNS cache to make sure the fake data is gone.
The Washington Post has an article explaining DNS hijacking.