The weak link in security
Terry Zink posts about the biggest problem with security: human errors. Everyone who is looking at security needs to think about the human factor. And how people can deliberately or accidentally subvert security.
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New security focused services
- laura
- Jun 3, 2011
Steve’s been busy this week working on some new products.
You can see the first at Did Company Leak? This is a neat little hack that looks at social media reports to see if a there are reports of leaks, breaches or hacks and gives you a list of tweets that reference them. And, yes, I did really receive spam to two addresses stolen from iContact customers today.
The Real Story
- steve
- Jun 15, 2011
We’ve heard this story before.
Someone gives an email address to a company. That company sends them email via an ESP for several years.
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Hackers break in to the ESP and steal a bunch of email addresses.
The original address owner starts getting targeted and random spam to that email address.
Analysing a data breach – CheetahMail
- steve
- May 5, 2011
I often find myself having to analyze volumes of email, looking for common factors, source addresses, URLs and so on as part of some “forensics” work, analyzing leaked emails or received spam for use as evidence in a case.
For large volumes of mail where I might want to dig down in a lot of detail or generate graphical or statistical reports I tend to use Abacus to slurp in and analyze all the emails, store them in a SQL database in an easy to handle format and then do the ad-hoc work from a SQL commandline. For smaller work, though, you can get a long way with unix commandline tools and some basic perl scripting.
This morning I received Ukrainian bride spam to a tagged address that I’d only given to one vendor, RedEnvelope, so that address has leaked to criminal spammers from somewhere. Looking at a couple of RedEnvelope’s emails I see they’re sending from a number of sources, so I decided to dig a little deeper.
I started by searching for all emails to that tagged address in my mail client, then copied all the matching emails to a newly created folder. Then I took a copy of that folder and split it into one file per email using a shell one-liner: