Well, we mostly survived 2016. A year ago I was making predictions about how 2016 would be the year of email security. I was thinking of things like TLS and authentication and access to the inbox. It wasn’t out of the question, Gmail said they’d be turning on p=reject sometime mid-year. They also were suggesting that they would be putting more value on messages that aligned, even in...
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...
One of the themes in some of my recent talks has been how some marketers teach their customers to become victims of phishing. Typically I’m talking about how companies register domains “just for email” and then use those for bulk messages. If customers get used to mail from company.ESP.com and companyemail.com they’re going to believe that company-email.com is also you...
As we head into the last month of the year, we look back at our November adventures. I spoke twice this month, first at Message Systems Insight in Monterey (my wrap-up post is here) and then with Ken Magill at the at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo (a short follow-up here, and a longer post on filters that came out of that discussion here.). Both were fun and engaging...
The Department of Defense is breaking HTML links in mail to .mil domains. This is part of the DoD’s attempt to curtail phishing. a great majority of intrusions into Pentagon networks are the result of the kind of human error that is exploited in phishing attacks, in which seemingly trustworthy e-mail links are used as attack vectors to hijack user computers, install malware or steal...
There seems to be an uptick in phishing attacks that have an impact on ESPs recently. Your CEO The most critical one is targeted spear-phishing attacks that claim to be internal documents sent by senior staff within the company, e.g. from the company CEO. It’s likely that the attached documents will compromise and backdoor your machine, and from their most of your internal network, using an...
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...
Last week, another email provider announced their systems had a security incident. Mandrill’s internal security team detected unusual activity and took the servers offline to investigate. While there’s no sign any data was compromised or servers infiltrated, Mandrill sent an email to their customers explaining the incident was due to a firewall rule change. Email service providers are a...
We’ve just gotten home from M3AAWG and I’m catching up with a lot of the administrative stuff that’s gotten ignored while we were soaking up the tons of information from some of the smartest Internet security folks around. One of the tasks I’m working on is checking on our recent bills from our health insurance provider. Their website seems to be down, so I called them up...
Both Steve and I have blogged about how we use tagged addresses to monitor and manage our incoming mail. This is not something unique to our system, but rather a feature that’s existed in many mail systems for a long time. Many unix systems support tagged addresses out of the box, but there are also commercial MTAs and even some webmail services that support tags. Gmail offers “+...
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