Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.
Social engineering is a long standing way to compromise security. Chunkhost reports today that they discovered accounts being compromised through social engineering of Sendgrid support. While the compromise did not work it was a close call. The only thing that saved the targeted customers was their implementation of 2 factor authentication.
We know many of our customers individually and personally, and are still careful about changing contact addresses and passwords. With larger customer bases, it’s vital that every person in the change follow security processes.
Lots of people are reporting ongoing (RTR:GE) messages from AOL today. This indicates the AOL mail servers are having problems and can’t accept mail. This has nothing to do with spam, filtering or malicious email. This is simply their servers aren’t functioning as well as they should be and so AOL can’t accept all the mail thrown at them. These types of blocks resolve themselves.
Update Feb 8, 2016: AOL users are having problems logging in. Word to the Wise cannot help you. Please do not contact us for help. Contact AOL directly.
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.
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