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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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.
First spam to Epsilon leaked address
- laura
- May 31, 2011
This morning I received the first two spams to the address of mine that was compromised during the Epsilon compromise back in April. Actually, I received two of them. One was the “standard” Adobe phish email. The other was similar but referenced Limewire instead of Adobe.
Read MoreGmail reports spear phishing attack
- laura
- Jun 1, 2011
No one, it seems, is immune from account compromise attempts. Today Google reported they had identified a systemic campaign to compromise Gmail accounts belonging to “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”
Google offers a number of solutions for users, including the ability to add 2 factor authentication to your Gmail account. I strongly recommend anyone who uses Gmail to do this.
This isn’t a security blog, but email is one of the major vectors used to infect machines. We’ve seen numerous break ins targeting email senders and ESPs, resulting in customer and recipient data being stolen and then used for spam. Everyone who uses email needs to be aware of the risks and maintain their email account integrity. Be careful clicking links in emails. Be careful opening webpages. Keep your antivirus software up to date.
Everyone is a target.