2018 JD Falk Award … a mailing list

It’s M3AAWG time. Even though we’re not there, I’m getting regular updates from friends and colleagues who are there. Yesterday, was the presentation of the 2018 JD Falk award. The award recognises “a particularly meritorious project undertaken by a dedicated individual or group reflecting the spirit of volunteerism and community building.” In this case, the award went to a group of people on the “BEC mailing list.”

BEC stands for Business Email Compromise (I had to look it up, now you don’t have to). According to  M3AAWG:

The Business Email Compromise List deals with a broad assortment of criminal activity and deceptive emails, often described as “Nigerian” schemes, that use phishing and fake social media activities to attract victims. By sharing information and expertise, they have blocked spoofed emails and malware; tracked real estate, romance, IRS, W2 and lottery schemes; and identified the money “mules” used to transfer illicit funds. BEC fraud accounts for more than $12 billion in losses globally and threatens users in 150 countries, according to the FBI’s IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center).

Congratulations to all the participants who work tirelessly to make the internet safer for businesses and consumers.

The group does have a video describing some of what they do.

I’m sure almost every field has these types of small, private, invite only lists that allow diverse groups of experts to collaborate and share information in a (mostly) secure environment. In many cases, this is good. Groups of smart, concerned people step up and collaborate to catch criminals and prevent bad behaviour. They do so because it’s the right thing to do. They’re not looking for praise or public adulation. Participation is often simply because this thing is a problem and they have the knowledge and ability to help solve the problem.

Fun with spam filters
Company responsibility and compliance

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And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
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I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

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Yahoo disabled forwarding

Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.

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2016 J.D. Falk Award

André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this week at the Paris meeting of M3AAWG. He was recognized for spearheading two distinct projects.
The first was the Operation Safety Net – Best Practices to Address Online, Mobile, and Telephony Threats  This 76 page report was written by global security experts. One of the major goals of the report was to discuss security in language accessible to policy makers and management. The report, newly updated in 2015, is available at the M3AAWG website. Making technical language accessible is, to my mind, one of the most important parts of getting security recommendations implemented.
In addition to his work in making security recommendations accessible, André was the lead architect behind the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. This legislation has greatly reduced the amount of spam received by Canadians. According to Leduc, CASL has improved permission practices by senders outside of Canada.
Congratulations to André.

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