User education doesn't work
A growing OSX security problem illustrates why user education is not the solution to virus, spam or malware problems.
HT: @briankrebs
Related Posts
Another kind of email breach
In all the recent discussions of email address thievery I’ve not seen anyone mention stealing addresses by abusing the legal system. And, yet, there’s at least one ambulance chasing lawyer that’s using email addresses that were never given to him by the recipients. Even worse, when asked about it he said that the courts told him he could use the email address and that we recipients had no recourse.
I’m not sure the spammer is necessarily wrong, but it’s a frustrating situation for both the recipient and the company that had their address list stolen.
A few years ago, law firm of Bursor and Fisher filed a host of class action lawsuits against various wireless carriers, including AT&T. At one point during the AT&T lawsuit the judge ruled that AT&T turn over their customer list, including email addresses, to Bursor and Fisher. Bursor and Fisher were then to send notices to all the AT&T subscribers notifying them of the suit.
This is not unreasonable. Contacting consumers by email to notify them of legal action makes a certain amount of sense.
But then Bursor and Fisher took it a step further. They looked at all these valid email addresses and decided they could use this for their own purposes. They started mailing advertisements to the AT&T wireless list.
Turn it all the way up to 11
I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.
Email marketing firm smacked by the SEC
Yes, the SEC. Really.
Apparently the email marketing firm mUrgent, which provides services to the restaurant and hospitality industry also had a side business. According to the complaint filed by the SEC last month, they had an entire boiler room set up to sell shares for their non-existent IPO.
I’d never heard of this firm before, so I did a little digging. First step, check out their website.