One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail. There were...
I mentioned yesterday that sometimes people and software screw up in ways that cause problems. Today I saw an article demonstrating just how bad these issues can be. Florida State University Housing Department sent detailed and confidential violation reports to tens of thousands of students. On Monday, March 14 at around 2 p.m., FSU first became aware that a glitch in the University Housing...
The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control. Apple letter to customers Encryption is a way to keep private information private in the digital world...
Happy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed. I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security...
A big part of my predictions for 2016, that I’ll publish shortly, is that security is going to be a huge issue. I think we’re really going to see receivers expecting senders to have their houses in order when it comes to sending mail. Of course, some filter companies need to get their houses in order to. Yesterday, a security researcher went public with problems in the TrendMicro anti...
On IRC today, someone mentioned an Ars Technica article discussing how a research team tried to contact Xfinity about a security flaw in their home security system. We attempted to contact anyone responsible for the security of Xfinity home security devices at the following addresses: security@xfinity.com; secure@xfinity.com; support@xfinity.com; info@xfinity.com; abuse@xfinity.com, but we did...
Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016...
The next step in email authentication is DMARC. I wrote a Brief DMARC primer a few years ago to help clear up some of the questions about DMARC and alignment. But I didn’t talk much about where DMARC was going. Part of the reason was I didn’t know where things were going and too much was unclear to even speculate. We’re almost 2 years down the line from the security issues that...
The nice folks over at Sparkpost asked me and other email experts for some thoughts on what we think the most important issues in email will be in 2016. I do think security is going to be a major, major change in delivery. From what I’ve seen there’s been a shift in the mindset of a lot of people. Previously a lot of folks in the email space were very accommodating to old systems and...
Brian Krebs did an AMA on Reddit today answering a bunch of questions people had for him. I suggest taking a browse through his answers. A few quotes stood out for me. Q: Why do you think organizations seem to prefer “learning these lessons the hard way”? It doesn’t seem to be an information gap, as most IT executives say security is important and most individual contributors...
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