CategoryTechnical

Tools!

I just added a DMARC validation tool over on tools.wordtothewise.com. You can give it a domain – such as ebay.com – and it will fetch the DMARC record, then explain and validate it. Or you can paste the DMARC record you’re planning to publish into it,  to validate it before you go live. If you’ve not seen our tools page before, take a look. As well as DMARC we have a DKIM...

The twilight of /8s

A “/8” is a block of 16,777,214 usable IP addresses. That’s a big fraction of the entire IPv4 address space – about 1/224, in fact. Each one is all the addresses that begin with a given number: 10.0.0.0/8 is all the IP addresses that begin with “10.”, “184.0.0.0/8” (or “184/8” for short) is all the IP addresses that begin with “184...

A due diligence story

due diligence noun. research and analysis of a company or organization done in preparation for a business transaction It’s a term that’s been around for five centuries or so. Originally it meant the effort that was necessary for something, but it evolved into a legal term for “the care that a reasonable person takes to avoid harm to other persons or their property“. More...

Why so many IP addresses?

Hi Laura, Merry Xmas and wishing you a Happy New Year! I recently looked at a popular ESP’s IPv4 space and I was astounded. How does an ESP get an IP allocation of 20,480 IPs? ARIN guidelines do not allow “MX/Mailing” IPs to count towards a valid justification especially in the case when each and every IP is being used for this purpose. That’s 80 /24’s…and at a time when we are out of IPv4 space…...

Is your website up? Are you sure?

“What would you do for 25% more sales?” It’s panicked gift-buying season, and I got mail this morning from Boutique Academia, part of their final push before Christmas. They’re hoping for some Christmas sales in the next three days. They do make some lovely jewelry – ask Laura about her necklace some time – so I clicked on their mail. That’s not good. I...

DKIM Canonicalization – or – why Microsoft breaks your mail

One of these things is just like the other Canonicalization is about comparing things to see if they’re the same. Sometimes you want to do a “fuzzy” comparison, to see if two things are interchangeable for your purposes, even if they’re not exactly identical. As a concrete example, these two email addresses: (Steve) steve@wordtothewise.com “Also Steve”...

Traffic Light Protocol

If you’re sharing sensitive computer security information it’s important to know how sensitive a document is, and who you can share it with. US-CERT and many other security organizations use Traffic Light Protocol as shorthand for how sensitive the information in a document is. It’s simple and easy to remember with just four colour categories: Red, Amber, Green and White. If...

Spam, campaign statistics and red flag URLs

It’s not often spammers send me their campaign statistics, but on Tuesday one did. The spam came “from” news@udemy.com, used udemy.com in the HELO and message-ids and, sure enough, was advertising udemy.com:   Received: from udemy.com (unknown [198.20.115.217]) by ... From: Udemy <news@udemy.com> Subject: The Photoshop Secret - Master Adobe Photoshop like a Pro...

More on ARC

ARC – Authenticated Received Chain – is a way for email forwarders to mitigate the problems caused by users sending mail from domains with DMARC p=reject. It allows a forwarder to record the DKIM authentication as they receive a mail, then “tunnel” that authentication on to the final recipient. If the final recipient trusts the forwarder, then they can also trust the...

Google drops obsolete crypto

Google is disabling support for email sent using version 3 of SSL or using the RC4 cypher. They’re both very old – SSLv3 was obsoleted by TLS1.0 in 1999, and RC4 is nearly thirty years old and while it’s aged better than some cyphers there are multiple attacks against it and it’s been replaced with more recent cyphers almost everywhere. Google has more to say about it on...

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