ArchiveJanuary 2016

Port25 blocking

A number of hosting providers are blocking outgoing port25. This has implications for a lot of smaller senders who either want to run their own mail server or who use SMTP to send mail to their ESP. What is port25 Port25 is the designated email sending channel. Much like websites are on port80 (or 8080) and DNS is on port53, email is sent over port25. Mostly. Why block Port25 Port25 blocking is a...

Security vendors and trust.

A big part of my predictions for 2016, that I’ll publish shortly, is that security is going to be a huge issue. I think we’re really going to see receivers expecting senders to have their houses in order when it comes to sending mail. Of course, some filter companies need to get their houses in order to. Yesterday, a security researcher went public with problems in the TrendMicro anti...

Spamhaus reports Verizon routing hijacked IPs

Late last week Spamhaus published a blog post detailing their investigation into Verizon routing millions of IP addresses hijacked by spammers. The Spamhaus blog post goes into some detail about what hijacked routing is. For cybercriminals to make use of their stolen blocks however, a crucial step is to find an Internet Service Provider(ISP) or network with the ability to route these IP addresses...

Triggered and transactional emails

Earlier this week I was talking on IRC with some colleagues. There was some kvetching about senders that think transactional emails are the same as triggered emails. This led to discussion about whether transactional and triggered emails are the same. I don’t think they are, but it took a while for me to come up with why I don’t think they’re the same. It took even longer to...

Facebook scams move to LinkedIn

There’s a fairly common Facebook scam where someone clones an account, then sends out friend requests to friends of that person. This actually happened to a friend over the holiday break. The only problem was that most of the folks who got friend requests were actually security people. Security people who thought it was very, very funny to play along with said scammer. The scam account...

Random thoughts on reporting abuse

On IRC today, someone mentioned an Ars Technica article discussing how a research team tried to contact Xfinity about a security flaw in their home security system. We attempted to contact anyone responsible for the security of Xfinity home security devices at the following addresses: security@xfinity.com; secure@xfinity.com; support@xfinity.com; info@xfinity.com; abuse@xfinity.com, but we did...

December 2015: The month in email

Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016...

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