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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Another kind of email breach
- laura
- May 18, 2011
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.
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.