Traffic Light Protocol

steve
Industry , Technical
August 29, 2016

If you’re sharing sensitive computer security information it’s important to know how sensitive a document is, and who you can share it with.
US-CERT and many other security organizations use Traffic Light Protocol as shorthand for how sensitive the information in a document is. It’s simple and easy to remember with just four colour categories: Red, Amber, Green and White. If you’re likely to come into contact with sensitive infosec data, or you just want to understand the severity of current leaks, it’s good to know that it exists.

TLP: RED

Sources may use TLP: RED when information cannot be effectively acted upon by additional parties, and could lead to impacts on a party’s privacy, reputation, or operations if misused.
Recipients may not share TLP: RED information with any parties outside of the specific exchange, meeting, or conversation in which it is originally disclosed.

TLP: AMBER

Sources may use TLP: AMBER when information requires support to be effectively acted upon, but carries risks to privacy, reputation, or operations if shared outside of the organizations involved.
Recipients may only share TLP: AMBER information with members of their own organization who need to know, and only as widely as necessary to act on that information.

TLP: GREEN

Sources may use TLP: GREEN when information is useful for the awareness of all participating organizations as well as with peers within the broader community or sector.
Recipients may share TLP: GREEN information with peers and partner organizations within their sector or community, but not via publicly accessible channels.

TLP: WHITE

Sources may use TLP: WHITE when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse, in accordance with applicable rules and procedures for public release.
TLP: WHITE information may be distributed without restriction, subject to copyright controls.

There’s more information about it, and a nice PDF handout, at US-CERT.

Working around email security

One of the common things I see as a delivery consultant is that companies do their best to set effective policies about email, but make it difficult to comply with those policies. It happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons that the tweets Steve shared about Sec. Clinton’s email server rang so true to me.

One of the commenters on that post disagrees, and uses banks and health care as an example.
Erik says:

Are you (accidentally) supporting phishing

One of the themes in some of my recent talks has been how some marketers teach their customers to become victims of phishing. Typically I’m talking about how companies register domains “just for email” and then use those for bulk messages. If customers get used to mail from company.ESP.com and companyemail.com they’re going to believe that company-email.com is also you.
There are other ways to train your customers to be phishing victims, too. Zeltzer security walks us through a couple emails that look so much like phishing that it fooled company representatives. Go take a read, they give a number of examples of both good and bad emails.

I was a little frustrated that the examples don’t include headers so we could look at the authentication. But the reality is only a teeny, tiny fraction of folks even know how to check headers. They’re not very useful for the average user.
Security is something we should never forget. As more and more online accounts are tied to our email addresses those of us who market to email addresses need to think about what we’re teaching our recipients about our company. DMARC and other authentication technologies can help secure email, but marketers also need to pay attention to how they are communicating with recipients.

December 2015: The month in email

Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.