Zoho, phishing and who’s next?

ZDnet reports that Zoho’s problems with phishing aren’t over. Their report states that Zoho is being used as a pipeline to exfiltrate data from phished accounts.

The software platform’s email address service, on both zoho.com and zoho.eu domains, is being exploited in 40 percent of phishing campaigns in which email “is the primary exfiltration vehicle.”

That’s some serious problems.

Look, managing abuse and security is hard. Every online service is at risk and companies need to think not only about how they might be attacked but also how they may be a vector for attacks against others. Email is even more vulnerable than most services. Not only is email the key to online identity it’s also the vector for the majority of online attacks.

Companies running email services for customers must have two things.

  1. A security team that monitors infrastructure for attacks from bad actors. These attacks include “customers” attempting to identify vulnerabilities in your system so they can spam or phish through the system.
  2. A compliance team that monitors customers and acts on those “customers:” that managed to sneak through the automated defences.

Every company that provides an email module in their platform is vulnerable. Every one. The big ESPs, the ISPs and the cable companies have pretty good defences these days. They’ve made spamming and phishing through their services hard enough that the bad guys are looking at much smaller companies.

No service is too small for them to look at. In fact, the smaller companies are ideal. Often the smaller companies outsource their infrastructure to a larger company, like SendGrid, Mandrill or Sparkpost. The spammers have been kicked directly off their platforms, but they can still spam through them, by abusing their customers.

The bad guys are getting smarter. They work hard to make themselves look like somewhat confused customers to extend any time on a platform. In every case they know they’re going to get cut off, at some point, they’re just trying to abuse the platform a little longer.

Compliance and security are hard. Being small is no excuse to ignore either.

Related Posts

Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

Read More

How to hire an affiliate

Yesterday I talked about all the reasons that using affiliate email can hurt overall delivery. In some cases, though, marketing departments and the savvy email marketer don’t have a choice in the matter. Someone in management makes a decision and employees are expected to implement it.
If you’re stuck in a place where you have to hire an affiliate, how can you protect the opt-in marketing program you’ve so painstakingly built? Nothing is foolproof, but there are some ways you can screen affiliates.

Read More

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:

Read More