Spamming ESPs: the followup

Campaign Monitor contacted me about yesterday’s post. The phrasing I picked out of the spammers AUP matched their AUP quite closely. In fact, if you plug the AUP into Google, Campaign Monitor comes up as one of the first hits.
It was not Campaign Monitor I was talking about. In fact, the ESP I received the mail from is not on the first 8 pages of Google hits for the phrases I posted.
A similar thing happened when I posted about Dell spamming me. Dell has multiple ESPs, and one of their ESPs contacted me directly in case they were the ones Dell was spamming through. It was no surprise to me that they weren’t the ESP involved.
This is what good ESPs do. Good ESPs monitor their reputation and monitor what people are saying about them. Good ESPs notice when people claim they’re being spammed and effectively reach out to the complainers so they can investigate the claim.
Good ESPs don’t just rely on the complaint numbers to take action. They keep an eye out on social networks to see who might be receiving mail they never asked for.

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ESPs leaking email addresses

Two of my tagged email addresses started getting identical pharma spam over the weekend. It is annoying me because I am now getting spam in a mailbox that was previously spam free. The spam is overwhelming the real traffic and I am having to make some decisions about what to do with the email addresses and their associated accounts with the companies I gave them to.
One thing I did notice, though, is that both companies use iContact as their ESP. A cursory check of my other mailboxes shows that none of my other tagged addresses are mailed through iContact. I don’t think it’s very likely that these two individual, unrelated companies made deals with the same spammers to sell address lists at the same time. It’s much more likely that there was a compromise somewhere and address lists were stolen.
Edit: Checked my other account and, likewise, I’m getting the same spam to a 3rd address serviced by iContact. I’ve sent mail to all 3 companies involved and we’ll see how they react.
And, as I was thinking about this, iContact just laid off a bunch of staff about the same time they announced their partnership with Goodmail. Based on past history with companies in this situation, it seems possible this is a disgruntled former employee. I’ve also seen reports from other people noticing spam to addresses given to iContact customers.

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Spamming ESPs

In my mailbox there is a definite uptick in spam from ESPs advertising their services.
Today’s email was from a company that has the following in their anti-spam policy:

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Spear phishing

It’s been about a year since people started publicly talking about spear phishing attacks against ESPs and major emailers. There was a lot of energy put into talking about how to protect against future attacks. I have to wonder, though, how much of that talk translated into action?
What processes do you have in place to protect your company against attacks?
If you’re at an ESP, do you have the ability to scan your outgoing stream for keywords or domains?
If you’re a brand, have you implemented restrictions on which employees have access to your databases?
What have you done since the last set of attacks? Are you vulnerable if new attacks start?
More information on ESP attacks:
Be on the lookout
Time for a real security response
Email attacks

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