What Ever Happened to ADSP?

Many mailbox providers are concerned about liability and expectations: they know they’ll be blamed by their users and even by senders when a senders’ ADSP policy leads to a legitimate (but unsigned) message being discarded. They’re also concerned that they’ll be expected to provide technical support for every mail operator who wants to use ADSP. Similarly, those same mail operators — whether senders of bulk marketing email, enterprise Exchange administrators, or mailbox providers themselves — are worried that there may be mail streams that aren’t applying DKIM correctly, or aren’t authenticating at all.

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Authenticating the Most Important Messages

Legitimate third parties — SalesForce, social networks, the 3rd party benefit sites favored by HR departments — forge your domain in mail to your users all the time. Keeping track of each of these can be impossible. Worse, in an ISP environment, you don’t really have that much control over what your users send.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t still gain some benefit from DKIM.

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Don’t Make It Easy For The Phishers

There’s no such thing as a Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, or a Final Ultimate Solution to the Phish Problem. What works is security in layers — and more layers, and more layers, and more layers. Yet in the search for that FUSSP or FUSPP, some of the simpler, lower layers have been skipped over.

One of these, believe it or not, is email authentication.

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Remembering the Good Times

The most effective early email-borne viruses didn’t need botnets. They didn’t change your computer settings, or steal your login credentials. And they somehow convinced regular users to help them spread.

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Security Alert: Phishing Attack Update

Yesterday, we updated on our report around the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Our original post is here, and yesterday’s post is here. …

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Security Alert: Update on ESP Phishing Attack

As you saw from our blog post yesterday, we have become aware of a serious phishing attack aimed in part specifically at ESPs, some direct mailers, and other sites. Since the time of our posting and into late evening yesterday …

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Security Alert: Phishing Attack Aimed at ESPs

Below is a note we sent to our Email Service Provider (ESP) partners this morning alerting them to a spear phishing campaign targeting ESPs. Spear phishing attacks are targeted and effective, with tremendous potential to damage corporate security.

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What Does It Mean to “Certify” Email?

In the certified email concept, what’s certified is that the sender of the message is following a set of standards or practices, and thus should be allowed to send the message. In the certified postal mail concept, what’s certified is that the message was successfully sent and/or delivered and/or received, depending on the level of service. The same word, applied to different aspects of the transaction, results in very different products.

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ZeuS Malware Has Retired, Worse Than Before

Spam content and approaches have evolved over times – bad guys were initially willing to sell fake body-enlargement pills to con you out of your money; now, rather than wait for sales to occur, they just dip directly into your bank account. So, what do you do?

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When Botnets Get Stymied, You’re Next

You’ve probably heard about botnets by now — those networks of home computers infected by viruses or other malware, controlled en masse by some shadowy bad guys. Botnets are used to send most of the world’s spam, attack web sites, steal credit card numbers and other personal information, or other nefarious activities — for anyone, for a fee.

Broadband connections are so prevalent these days, all over the world, that botnet operators can pick and choose which infected computers are sufficiently high-bandwidth for their needs. But these broadband connections all flow through one ISP or another, so ISPs are very aware of the problem — and extremely concerned.

Today MAAWG released a paper aimed at helping these ISPs, titled “MAAWG Common Best Practices for Mitigating Large Scale Bot Infections in Residential Networks.” It’s the product of many discussions, including many of the leading experts. “As an industry,” MAAWG Chair Michael O’Reirdan said in the press release, “we are becoming more proactive in alerting customers when bots are detected on their computers and in helping users remove the malware before it can harm them.”

It’ll take some time, and a lot of work, but the effectiveness of botnets will — after a while — be reduced. And then what? Now that they’ve gotten a taste of all the money to be made, the botnet operators won’t go back to flipping perogies. They’ll find another way.

That’d be you. …

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