Social engineering is a long standing way to compromise security. Chunkhost reports today that they discovered accounts being compromised through social engineering of Sendgrid support. While the compromise did not work it was a close call. The only thing that saved the targeted customers was their implementation of 2 factor authentication. We know many of our customers individually and...
According to Brian Krebs the compromise of Target’s POS system probably originated with a phishing attack against one of Target’s vendors. This attack compromised credentials of the HVAC vendor and possibly allowed the hackers entrance into Target’s systems. Interestingly, Brian mentions Ariba, a company I’ve been forced to deal by a large customer of ours. I’m not...
U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) announced today that she’s not going to seek re-election in 2014. Last time around, the race between her and Minnesota businessman Jim Graves was very close. Mr. Graves lost by a very narrow margin. Graves had already announced his intention to take on Ms. Bachmann again next year. As the news came out on Bachmann’s decision, both...
Many of us have lots of accounts on various networking sites, but how much attention do we pay to password security? If you haven’t heard, someone managed to compromise the Associated Press’ twitter account today. Not only was the account compromised, but they put out a fake tweet claiming that there were explosions at the White House and President Obama was injured. A funny prank...
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about handling abuse complaints. As a bit of a throwaway I mentioned that new companies don’t always think about how their service can be abused before releasing it on the unsuspecting internet. Today’s blog post by Margot Romary at the Return Path In the Know blog reminds me that it’s not always new companies that don’t think about abuse...
There’s been a lot of interesting reaction to Steve’s security post yesterday. A lot of people seem upset that we have pointed out one of the ways that ESPs may be getting compromised. Complaints range from the message being overly simplistic, through to complaints that we just don’t understand how much of an issue security is, through to complaints that we’re not pointing...
Go to your ESP customer login page and use “View Source” to look at the HTML (under “Page” on Internet Explorer, “Tools->Web Developer” on Firefox, and “View” on Safari). Go on, I’ll wait. Search for the word autocomplete. If it says something like autocomplete=”off” then your web developers have already thought about this...
MAAWG is coming up and lots of us are working on documents, and presentations. One of the recent discussions is what kind of security recommendations, if any, should we be making. I posted a list of things including “Don’t browse the web with a machine running Windows.” Another participant told me he thought my recommendation to not use a windows machine to browse the web was...
Today another major retailer announced their customer files were compromised. This company had clearly implemented some security that kept hackers from getting too much information. Passwords were hashed and credit card numbers were kept on a separate server, which does signal that the company designed with security in mind. Nevertheless, personal information was compromised. Is there anyway to...
ESPs are under attack and being tested. But I’m not sure much progress in handling and responding to the attacks has been made since the Return Path warning or the Epsilon compromise. Last week a number of email marketers became aware that attacks against ESPs and senders were ongoing. The shock and surprise many people exhibited prompted my Spear Phishing post on Friday. The first round of...
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