Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures. We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet...
Today it was revealed that Yahoo has been scanning people’s email for the federal government. Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning...
One of the things I discovered yesterday while looking at Krebs on Security was that Google Alphabet has a program to provide hosting and dDOS protection for journalists. Project Shield, as it’s called, is a free service for approved applicants that keeps up websites that might be taken down otherwise. Eligible organizations include those providing news, information on human rights and...
Cybersecurity has been on my mind lately. There is a lot of bad stuff going on, from giant dDOS attacks, to subscription bombing, to the ongoing low level harassment that some people have to deal with on a daily basis. I’ve written a lot about how I think marketers are going to have to step up and stop being a conduit for abuse. I do believe this. There are a lot of different issues to...
I’ve been talking about security more on the blog. A lot of that is because the security issues are directly affecting many senders. The biggest effect recently has been on companies ending up on the SBL because their signup forms were the target of a subscription attack. But there are other things affecting online spaces that are security related. Right now not much of it is affecting...
The recent subscription bombs have started me thinking about how online organizations handle abuse, or don’t as the case may be. Deciding what to address is all about severity. More severe incidents are handled first. Triage is critical, there’s never really enough time or resources to investigate abuse. What makes an event severe? The answer is more complicated that one might think...
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...
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...
This popped up on my FB feed yesterday.
What say you? Do we need to create a major effort to improve online security? What challenges do you see to making it work?
Edit: After I published this, I found an article stating that 3.7 million people had their personal health information compromised in a recent attack.
One of the common things I see as a delivery consultant is that companies do their best to set effective policies about email, but make it difficult to comply with those policies. It happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons that the tweets Steve shared about Sec. Clinton’s email server rang so true to me. One of the commenters on that post disagrees, and uses banks and health...
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