Compromises and phishing and email

Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure.
Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s credentials were hacked. These credentials allowed the criminals to access customer data, and mailing lists. Sendgrid has a blog post listing things customers should do and describing the changes they’re making to their systems.
Last month it was Mandrill. Today it’s Sendgrid. It could be anyone tomorrow.
Security is hard, there’s no question about it. Users have to have access. Data has to be transferred. Every user, every API, every open port is a way for a bad actor to attempt access.
While it wasn’t said directly in the Sendgrid post, it’s highly likely that the employee compromise was through email. Most compromises go back to a phish or virus email that lets the attacker access the recipient’s computer. Users must be ever vigilant.
We, the email industry, haven’t made it easy for users to be vigilant. Just this weekend my best friend contacted me asking if the email she received from her bank was a phishing email. She’s smart and she’s vigilant, and she still called the number in the email and started the process without verifying that it was really from the bank. She hung up in the transaction and then contacted me to verify the email.
She sent me headers, and there was a valid DMARC record. But, before I could tell her it wasn’t a phishing email, I had to go check the whois record for the domain in question to make sure it was the bank. It could have been a DMARC authenticated email, but not from the bank. The whois records did check out, and the mail got the all clear.
There’s no way normal people can do all this checking on every email. I can’t do it, I rely on my tagged addresses to verify the mail is legitimate. If the mail comes into an address I didn’t give the sender, then it’s not legitimate – no matter what DMARC or any other type of authentication tells me. But most people don’t have access to tagged or disposable addresses.
I don’t know what the answers are. We really can’t expect people to always be vigilant and not fall for phishing. We’re just not all present and vigilant every minute of every day.
For all of you who are going to tell me that every domain should just publish a p=reject statement I’ll point out DMARC doesn’t solve the phishing problem. As many of us predicted, phishers just move to cousin and look alike domains. DMARC may protect citi.com, but citimarketingemail.com or citi.phisher.com isn’t.
We’ve got to do better, though. We’ve got to protect our own data and our customer’s data better. Email is the gateway and that means that ESPs, with their good reputations and authentication, are prime targets for criminals.

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Get a helmet

There’s been a lot of interesting reaction to Steve’s security post yesterday. A lot of people seem upset that we have pointed out one of the ways that ESPs may be getting compromised. Complaints range from the message being overly simplistic, through to complaints that we just don’t understand how much of an issue security is, through to complaints that we’re not pointing out that some ESPs actually are secure. Some people have even provided counter examples of how simple it is to compromise any company, so why are we picking on ESPs.
Security is a problem any company faces. Some industries are bigger targets than others, and ESPs have really jumped up the target list. ESPs are getting lists stolen. ESPs are getting reputations stolen.
There’s one ESP I know for a fact that has lost multiple customer lists 3 times. Three companies I get email from are hosted there. When all three of those tagged addresses started getting spam, the only logical assumption was that the ESP was compromised. Again. Those are companies I want to hear from, though, and I changed addresses on their sites after every breach. What’s distressing, though, is the total lack of response from either the customer or the ESP to my notices about the breaches.  To be fair, the problem seems to have stopped more recently.
Silence and refusal to address an issue is a big problem. An address I gave a company on the Only Influencers list was stolen (I’m not going to say leaked because I actually trust them to not have violated their privacy policy) sometime back in early 2011. I didn’t notice right away because my spam filters were catching the mail, but eventually the spammers managed to get one into my inbox. When I saw it, I started checking and realized that address had been compromised a long time ago. I notified the company, with as much history of the address as I could. I ended my message with:

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ESPs are under attack and being tested. But I’m not sure much progress in handling and responding to the attacks has been made since the Return Path warning or the Epsilon compromise.
Last week a number of email marketers became aware that attacks against ESPs and senders were ongoing. The shock and surprise many people exhibited prompted my Spear Phishing post on Friday.
The first round of phishing went out on Wednesday, by Friday they were coming from a different ESP. Whether this was a compromised ESP customer or employee it doesn’t matter. ESPs should have reaction plans in place to deal with these threats.
It’s been months since the first attacks. This is more than enough time to have implemented some response to reports of attacks. Yet, many people I talked to last week had no idea what they should or could be doing to protect themselves and their customers.
Last time the attacks were publicly discussed I was frustrated with many of the “how to respond” posts because few of them seemed to address the real issue. People seemed to be pushing agendas that had nothing to do with actually fixing the security holes. There were lots of recommendations to sign all mail with DKIM, implement 2 factor authentication, deploy validation certificates on web properties, or adhere to sender’s best practices.
None of those recommendations actually addressed the gaping security hole: Humans.

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Today another major retailer announced their customer files were compromised. This company had clearly implemented some security that kept hackers from getting too much information. Passwords were hashed and credit card numbers were kept on a separate server, which does signal that the company designed with security in mind. Nevertheless, personal information was compromised.
Is there anyway to keep information safe if it’s accessible from the internet? Some of my uber-security conscious friends would say no. I am beginning to believe them.

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