A bit of advice from the folks at the CBL, posted with permission and some light editing. I’ve been seeing some folks report longer connection times at some places, and this might explain some of it. It’s certainly possible, even likely, that the large ISPs are getting a lot of this kind of traffic. A botnet, likely a variant of cutwail, has been for the past several years been...
If you follow any infosec sources you’ve probably already heard a lot about Meltdown and Spectre, Kaiser and KPTI. If not, you’ve probably seen headlines like Major flaw in millions of Intel chips revealed or Intel sells off for a second day as massive security exploit shakes the stock. What is it? These are all about a cluster of related security issues that exploit features shared...
A few months ago I was talking about different mailbox tools and mentioned email addresses are the keys to our online identity. They are, email addresses are the magic key that authenticates us and opens access to different accounts. The bad guys know this too. The Justice department recently announced a plea deal related to compromised email accounts. The individual in question gained access to...
Earlier this year the Exploratorium was the victim of a phishing attack. They’ve posted an article on what happened and how they discovered and dealt with the issue. But they didn’t just report on the attack, they dissected it. And, as is appropriate for a organization with a mission of education, they mapped out what they discovered during the investigation. There are a couple of...
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure. A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and...
Last month Brian Krebs reported that the Ashley Madison database was compromised. Ashley Madison is a dating site that targets married folks who are looking to have affairs. Needless to say, there is a lot of risk for users if their data is found on the released data. Today what is supposedly the Ashley Madison data was released. The release of this data can have some significant impacts on the...
Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure. Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s...
The FBI announced today arrests of three people in the ESP data breaches from the compromises of various ESPs a few years ago. Krebs on Security: Feds Indict Three in 2011 Epsilon Hack Department of Justice: Three Defendants Charged with One of the Largest Reported Data Breaches in U.S. History After stealing over a billion addresses from 8 ESPs, the lists were monetized through affiliate...
M3AAWG is on a roll lately with published documents. They recently released the Compromised User ID Best Practices (pdf link).
Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.
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