Random thoughts on reporting abuse

stop_atOn 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 not get a response to our attempt to disclose the issues to the vendor.

I’m not surprised they didn’t get a response from those addresses, there’s no mail server there. What I do question is a “security” group that doesn’t check their email bounces. Of course, it could be the mail is sitting in a queue somewhere waiting for it to time out due to lack of DNS resolution.
Thinking about how to find the right email address led me down the path of considering manually reporting problems or spam to groups. What is the right way to do it? I’ll be honest, I’ve mostly stopped reporting abuse to senders I don’t know, and in many cases I only report abuse as a favor to colleagues.
There isn’t a standard for how to accept abuse reports. Yes, yes, yes I know about RFC2142. I’ll just point out that’s a nearly 20 year old RFC that’s still “standards track” and hasn’t been updated or improved since it was initially published.
Historically, the internet was very different when 2142 was published. In 1997 the web was still new. Not every company even had a website. Abuse problems were much simpler. Those companies that had a website tended to have one website, on one domain. The sent mail from the same domain, with links pointing to the same domain. A single abuse@ address maintained at the domain could accept reports about a lot of different things.
Today, email is much more complex. Many organizations have dozens of different domains for different purposes and different . Even a company as small as Word to the Wise has different domains for different things. Many of them are just websites, no email services provided. Larger organizations have different domains for different divisions. They have domains that never receive email and never send email, but are present in email sends. Should a company maintain a server on that domain, with all the associated costs and hassle, just to get the occasional complaint?
In some ways it doesn’t matter that these ESPs can’t get individual abuse reports because enforcement at most ESPs is an issue of numbers. Either they get enough FBL emails to justify action or they don’t. The individual complaints don’t matter and don’t move the needle.
Even in the case were companies care and want those individual complaints there are barriers that prevent reports from getting to the right place.

Legacy Domains

Companies have lots of legacy domains from acquisitions and mergers. Some of these domains are maintained and used, some of them aren’t. In any case, abuse handling isn’t always considered when merging companies and making sure reports get to the right place.

Complex Ownership and Responsibility

Sometimes the company that “owns” an IP doesn’t actually control the IP or the users of that IP.  Some of this is a consequence of merger and acquisitions. Not all of it is, though. Sometimes it’s a business partnership that may not be completely visible to the outside. To anyone outside the IPs look like they’re managed and owned and provisioned by provider A but they’re actually the responsibility of provider B. Earthlink broadband is one example that comes to mind – that was a maze of twisty little providers.

Filters

It’s near impossible to run a mail server without any filters these days. Any decent filter will catch spam, including forwarded spam. Companies that run abuse@ on their primary domain can often filter out reports. In many filters it’s hard, if not impossible, to special case specific addresses. Larger companies can.

Hosting Intercepting “special” boxes

Many email hosting platforms, like Google Apps, prohibit role accounts like abuse@ or postmaster@. This means companies using Google Apps often cannot monitor abuse complaints at the standard addresses.
It’s not always easy to necessarily contact “the right people” to get a security repot handled. Particularly if you’re not a part of the community and your report is something unusual. But if the company wants reports there are usually ways to get to the right person. Sometimes this involves calling the switchboard and leaving messages. Sometimes it involved poking around on a website. Sometimes it means joining a mailing list (like NANOG, or mailop, or one of the security lists) and asking for help. Generally if you’re polite, show some clue and share as much info as possible, someone will reach out and help you find the right person to talk to.
In the Xfinity case, the researchers have no excuse for not contacting Comcast directly. They sent mail to a non-existent domain. They never noticed the mail bounced? Even so, as there was no response, they should have worked a little harder to get a response from Xfinity. For instance, while writing this post I found a toll free number directly into Comcast’s security desk. I visited the page that the researchers said “had no useful information”. I went to the bottom and saw “security”, which takes you to https://constantguard.xfinity.com. I clicked on the giant “HELP” link and found:

The Customer Security Assurance organization has been established to ensure a safe and secure online experience for Comcast customers. This team is a dedicated group of security professionals who respond to issues pertaining to phishing, spam, infected computers (commonly referred to as bots), online fraud and other security issues.

  • Business Hours: 6:00am – 2:00am EST, 7 days a week
  • Contact: 1-888-565-4329

Xfinity Security Help Page

(Full disclosure: I know some of the folks who handle that 1-888 number).
It’s not always easy. But it is a very rare case where I haven’t been able to get in touch with someone willing to talk to me about an issue with persistence and work. It’s usually not worth the time, but it’s generally not as hard as reported.

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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.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

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Are you ready for DMARC?

secure_email_blogThe next step in email authentication is DMARC. I wrote a Brief DMARC primer a few years ago to help clear up some of the questions about DMARC and alignment. But I didn’t talk much about where DMARC was going. Part of the reason was I didn’t know where things were going and too much was unclear to even speculate.
We’re almost 2 years down the line from the security issues that prompted Yahoo to turn on p=reject in their DMARC record. This broke a lot of common uses of email. A lot of the damage created by this has been mitigated and efforts to fix it continue. There’s even an IETF draft looking at ways to transfer authentication through mailing lists and third parties.
For 2016, DMARC alignment is going to be a major factor in deliverability for bulk email, even in the absence of a published DMARC record.

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Where do you accept reports?

One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine.
What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew organically and also purchased several smaller ESPs over the course of a few years. This means they have at least 5 or 6 different domains.
The problem is, they don’t effectively monitor abuse@ for those different domains. In fact, it took me blogging about it to get any response from the ESP. Unfortunately, that initial response was “why didn’t you tell us about it?”
I pointed out I’d tried abuse@domain1, abuse@domain2, abuse@domain3, and abuse@domain4. Some of the addresses were in the mail headers, others were in the ESP record at abuse.net. Three of those addresses bounced with “no such user.” In other words, I’d tried to tell them, but they weren’t accepting reports in a way I could access.
Every ESP should have active abuse addresses at domains that show up in their mail. This means the bounce address domain should have an abuse address. The reverse DNS domain should have an abuse address. The d= domain should have an abuse address.
And those addresses should be monitored. In the Dell case, the ESP did have an active abuse@ address but it was handled by corporate. Corporate dropped the ball and never forwarded the complaint to the ESP reps who could act on the spam issue.
ESPs and all senders should have abuse@ addresses that are monitored. They should also be tested on a regular basis. In the above case, addresses that used to work were disabled during some upgrade or another. No one thought to test to see if they were working after the change.
You should also test your process. If you send in a complaint, how does it get handled? What happens? Do you even have a complaint handling process outside of “count and forward”?
All large scale senders should have appropriate abuse@ addresses that are monitored. If you don’t, well, you look like a spammer.

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