Today the US government unsealed an indictment against 2 Russian agents and 2 hackers for breaking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing personal information. The information gathered during the hack was used to target government officials, security employees and private individuals.
Email is so central to our online identity. Compromise an email account and you can get access to social media, and other accounts. Email is the key to the kingdom.
Today it was revealed that Yahoo has been scanning people’s email for the federal government.
Read MoreI’ve been talking about security more on the blog. A lot of that is because the security issues are directly affecting many senders. The biggest effect recently has been on companies ending up on the SBL because their signup forms were the target of a subscription attack. But there are other things affecting online spaces that are security related. Right now not much of it is affecting email senders, but it’s good to be aware of.
DDOS attacks
There has been an increase in DDOS attacks against different companies and network. Some of the online game sites have been targeted including EA, Blizzard and others. A group called PoodleCorp is claiming responsibility for those attacks.
Another set of DDOS attacks hit Brian Krebs’ website this week. The site stayed up, but Akamai has told Brian they can no longer host his website. His website is down for now and the foreseeable future.
While this activity doesn’t affect marketers directly, it does tell us that there is active development happening on the less legal side of the internet. The volumes of the recent attacks have sent records. They’re also changing in scope and including new kinds of traffic in an effort to knock sites offline. Even more concerning, they appear to be systematically attempting to discover defenses in order to attack the internet as a whole.
Increase in Spam
Spam has been on the decrease over the last few years. Many of us were treating it as a mostly-solved problem. But a new report from Cisco Talos shows that trend is reversing and spam levels are increasing. Current levels are approaching those last seen more than 5 years ago. Cisco Talos has used a number of different sources of data, all showing an increase in spam directly and indirectly.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peeple app, which lets random individuals provide reviews of other people. The founders of the company seem to believe that no one is ever mean on the Internet and that all reviews are accurate. They’ve tried to assure us that no negative reviews will be published for unregistered users. They’re almost charming in their naivety, and it might be funny if this wasn’t so serious.
The app is an invitation to online abuse and harassment. And based on the public comments I’ve seen from the founders they have no idea what kind of pain their app is going to cause. They just don’t seem to have any idea of the amount of abuse that happens on the Internet. We work with and provide tools to abuse and security desks. The amount of stuff that happens as just background online is pretty bad. Even worse are the attacks that end up driving people, usually women, into hiding.
The Peeple solution to negative reviews is two fold.