Ongoing subscription form abuse

Last week Spamhaus posted information on the ongoing subscription attacks. They provided a more information about them that was not make public previously, including some information about the volume of mail some targets received.
Today SendGrid also blogged about this, going into a little more detail about why senders should care about this. They also provided a number of suggestions for how to mitigate the risk of being part of an attack.
Many abstract images on the theme of computers, Internet and high technology.
There are a couple of things I think it’s important for folks to realize.

This is the new normal

As Spamhaus states, there is some evidence that this may have been a test run for a new product selling mailbombing as a service. Even if it’s not, although I do agree with their assessment, this is something we need to address. Many online companies are struggling with how to stop being a conduit for abuse and harassment. These issues aren’t easy, but they’re there and we have to address them.
Spamhaus saw a direct attack yesterday and a number of ESPs woke up to new SBL listings this morning.

The damage is ongoing

ESPs and other relevant parties have stepped up to the plate to minimize the effect on victims. Despite this there are many addresses still receiving email at significant volumes. Certainly it’s not the hundreds per minute but addresses are permanently affected by this kind of abuse. Because of the targets, including WordPress installations, much of the mail isn’t coming through traditional ESPs.
This diverse sources make it difficult to block the mail, in the short term and the long term.

This is not about spam

This isn’t just about marketing mail. Again, a lot of the conduits for abuse are WordPress forms. Some of the conduits are online alert services. This is about online services being used as tools for harassment.

We need new tools

The problem with spam is a lot of people suffer a little bit of damage. This means most tools use volume of complaints as a primary metric. But with direct harassment like this, it’s a lot of damage for a small number of people. Until Spamhaus started listing ESPs, no one knew it was happening. This includes the ESP that sent 81,000 confirmation emails to 9 email addresses over the course of 2 weeks.

We need new strategies

COI isn’t a great solution for this. In fact, the 81,000 emails were all COI requests. Captchas are not idea for a number of reasons, including discouraging signups from actual customers. We, as an industry, are going to have to think of ways to fix this. Yes, right now COI and captcha are the only solutions we have. But that doesn’t mean they are the only solutions, they’re just the stop gap. I don’t think it’s a huge secret that I don’t like the subscription validation companies very much, but they have the opportunity here to really stop this kind of abuse. No, their current SMTP tickling and delivery testing isn’t going to catch this (and, in fact, will cause problems for smaller targets), but there are other strategies they can create to address this.
Overall, this is something that needs to be addressed to prevent significant damage to individuals. Subscription forms need to be secured better and high volume senders need to pay attention to their address lists. One thing that was discovered is that this is not new. Some ESPs found a single address on thousands of their lists added over months. Low level abuse was happening, we didn’t see it because we weren’t looking. Now, we know it’s there and we must act to fix it.

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Incentivizing incites fraud

There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they don’t collect addresses from a certain percentage of customers.
All of these types of incentive programs are problematic for email collection.
listshoppingcart
On the shopper side, if they want mail from a retailer, they’ll give an address simply because they want that mail.  In fact, asking for an address without offering any incentive is way more likely to get their real address. If they don’t want mail but there is a financial incentive, they’re likely to give a made up address. Sometimes it will be deliverable, but belong to another person. Sometimes it will be undeliverable. And sometimes it will be a spamtrap. One of my delivery colleagues occasionally shares addresses she’s found in customer lists over on her FB page. It’s mostly fun stuff like “dont@wantyourmail.com” and “notonyour@life.com” and many addresses consisting of NSFW type words.
On the employee side there can also be abuses. Retailers have tried to tie employee evaluations, raises and promotions to the number of email addresses collected. Other retailers will actively demote or fire employees who don’t collect a certain number of addresses. In either case, the progression is the same. Employees know that most customers don’t want the mail, and they feel bad asking. But they’re expected to ask, so they do. But they don’t push, so they don’t get enough addresses. Eventually, to protect their jobs, they start putting in addresses they make up.
Either way, incentivizing point of sale collection of information leads to fraud. In a case I read about in the NY Times, it can lead to fraud much more serious than a little spam. In fact, Wells Fargo employees committed bank fraud because of the incentives related to selling additional banking products at the teller.

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Growing your list carefully

Karl Murray wrote a great set of recommendations for growing an email marketing list. I really can’t think of anything I would have said differently. Touching customers and getting contact information from them is great, but there are situations where this gets bad addresses. Too many bad addresses can impact delivery.
So how do you grow your list without falling into a delivery trap? The specific recommendations, as always, depend on your specific situation. But knowing how bad addresses get onto your list will allow you to implement mitigation strategies that actually work.

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Abuse, triage and data sharing

The recent subscription bombs have started me thinking about how online organizations handle abuse, or don’t as the case may be. Deciding what to address is all about severity. More severe incidents are handled first. Triage is critical, there’s never really enough time or resources to investigate abuse.
biohazardmail
What makes an event severe? The answer is more complicated that one might think. Some of the things that ISP folks look at while triaging incoming complaints include:

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