Recent Posts

Fun with spam filters

laura
Oct 9, 2018

Industry

I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account.

All filters are not equal

laura
Oct 8, 2018

Industry

Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case.

DNS Flag Day

steve
Oct 5, 2018

Technical

There are quite a lot of broken DNS servers out there. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you, but some of them might be yours. And you might not notice that until your domains stop working early next year.

Zoho, phishing and who’s next?

laura
Oct 4, 2018

Industry

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.

Schroedinger’s email

laura
Oct 3, 2018

Industry

The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation.

Evolution of policy

laura
Oct 1, 2018

Industry

Last week, I talked about policy, using some different blocklist policies as examples. In that post I talked about how important it is that policy evolve. One example of that is how we’ve been evolving policy related to companies that get listed on Purchased Lists and ESPs. Who is listed has evolved over time, and we’re actually looking at some policy changes right now.

Security Truths

laura
Sep 27, 2018

Industry

Being in infosec for so long takes its toll. I've come to the conclusion that if you give a data point to a company, they will eventually sell it, leak it, lose it or get hacked and relieved of it. There really don't seem to be any exceptions, and it gets depressing.
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Thoughts on policy

laura
Sep 26, 2018

Industry

A particular blocklist, once again, listed a major ESP this week. Their justification is “this is our policy.” Which is true, it is their policy to list under these circumstances. That doesn’t make it a good policy, or even an effective policy. It’s simply a policy.

Complaints, contacts and consequences

laura
Sep 25, 2018

Industry

Yesterday the CRM system Zoho suffered an unexpected outage when their registrar, TierraNet suspended their domain. According to TechCrunch, Zoho’s CEO says there was no notification to the company and that the company had only 3 complaints about phishing.