Earlier this week, the investment firm Marlin Equity Partners announced they purchased BlueHornet Networks from Digital River. BlueHornet has been around for quite a while. In 2004 they were acquired by Digital River and run as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Congrats to the folks working at BlueHornet.
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
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 MoreThere are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well.
The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” Trust me, the folks blocking your mail don’t want to hear about your business model. They just want you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the space who actually wants to hear about your business model – so I can help you reach your goals without doing things that get you blocked.
A few months ago, after getting off yet another phone call where I talked clients down from explaining their business model to Spamhaus, I put together list of phrases that senders really shouldn’t use when talking to their ESP, a blocklist provider or an abuse desk. I posted it to a closed list and one of the participants put it together into a bingo card.
A lot of these statements are valid marketing and business statements. But the folks responsible for blocking mail don’t really care. They just want their users to be happy with the mail they receive.