Censorship and free speech online

One of the things I discovered yesterday while looking at Krebs on Security was that Google Alphabet has a program to provide hosting and dDOS protection for journalists.  Project Shield, as it’s called, is a free service for approved applicants that keeps up websites that might be taken down otherwise. Eligible organizations include those providing news, information on human rights and monitoring elections.
This is something I hadn’t heard of before and my only reaction is good for Google.
Look, we’ve gotten to the point where attackers have resources beyond the scope that most of us can imagine. It’s expensive even for large organizations to manage and pay for the level of protection they need.
Even more importantly a lot of very important work is done by individuals or small organizations. Brian is a prime example of that. He does an incredible job investigating online crime on his own time. His site and his information is an invaluable resource for many. Losing his site, and losing his information would leave a huge hole in the security community. There are other folks in other spaces who, like Brian, don’t have the resources to protect themselves but do have important things to say and share.
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I’m glad to see Google committing their resources and skills to help organizations protect themselves. It’s so important that this work is done and we don’t lose voices just because they can’t afford hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
There has been abuse and harassment online for as long as I’ve been here. But it seems recently the size and severity of attacks have increased. And a lot of service providers are struggling with how to manage it and what their responsibilities are.
A few weeks ago Facebook deleted an iconic photo from the Vietnam era due to child nudity in the photo. That decision was reversed and discussed in many, many different places. One of the most interesting discussion happened on a friend’s Facebook feed. Many of the participants work at various online providers. They have to make these kinds of decisions and create policy to do the right thing – whatever the right thing is. It was very interesting to be able to follow the discussion and see how many different issues FB and other online providers have to consider when creating these types of policies.
I thing the thing I have to confront the most about the internet is how big it is. And how crucial it’s become to all sorts of issues. Social media can be a cesspool of abuse, there’s no question. But it can also be a force for good. I’m glad companies like Google are stepping up to preserve the good parts of the internet.

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January 2016: The Month in Email

Jan2016_blogHappy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed.
I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security and authentication, which I think will be THE major topic in email this year both in policy and in practice (see my post about an exploit involving Trend Micro and another about hijacked Verizon addresses). Expect to hear more about this 2016 continues.
My other exciting January project was the launch of my “Ask Laura” column, which I hope will prove a great resource for people with questions about email. Please let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see me answer for your company or your clients — I’ll obscure any identifying information and generalize the answers to be most widely applicable for our readers.
In other industry news, it’s worth noting that Germany has ruled it illegal to harvest users’ address books (as Facebook and other services do). Why does that make sense? Because we’re seeing more and more phishing and scams that rely on social engineering.
In best practices, I wrote about triggered and transactional emails, how they differ, and what to consider when implementing them as part of your email program. Steve describes an easy-to-implement best practice that marketers often ignore: craft your mails so the most important information is shown as text.
I re-published an older post about SMTP rules that has a configuration checklist you might find useful as you troubleshoot any issues. And a newer issue you might be seeing is port25 blocking, which is important if you are hosting your own email senders or using SMTP to send to your ESP.
Finally, I put together some thoughts about reporting abuse. We work closely with high-volume abuse desks who use our Abacus software, and we know that it’s often not worth the time for an individual to report an incident – but I still think it’s worthwhile to have the infrastructure in place, and I wrote about why that is.

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Random thoughts on reporting abuse

stop_atOn IRC today, someone mentioned an Ars Technica article discussing how a research team tried to contact Xfinity about a security flaw in their home security system.

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The Cyber and The Security

Cybersecurity has been on my mind lately. There is a lot of bad stuff going on, from giant dDOS attacks, to subscription bombing, to the ongoing low level harassment that some people have to deal with on a daily basis. I’ve written a lot about how I think marketers are going to have to step up and stop being a conduit for abuse. I do believe this. There are a lot of different issues to discuss but there are also many, many different stake holders in the issue of cybersecurity.
I’ve been on multiple calls with different groups over the last few weeks discussing the implications of the subscription attack and how it was carried out. The majority of my focus is email and how to protect senders from becoming a conduit for abuse. Other folks participating on the call are looking at what abuse is out there and how to stop it or minimize it.
One thing that came up on a recent call is that the bulk of dDOS traffic that took Brian Krebs’ website down was from various Internet of Things devices. Security cameras, DVD players, televisions, lightbulbs and other connected devices were part of the problem. It’s a huge issue, and one that cannot simply be mitigated by just ISPs and providers. But convincing individuals to secure their lightbulbs can be a challenge, we can’t even protect their computers completely. Convincing companies to stop providing default usernames and passwords or using the same keys for every device is another challenge.
These are big issues that we’re going to have to deal with.
Last night, with 100 million of my virtual friends and a small group of local ones, I watched the first Presidential debate. Part of the debate was about cyber security. To misquote Vice President Biden, “Cybersecurity is a big freaking deal.” We have nation states, and groups with the resources of nation states, conducting covert operations online. We have hacking, compromises, bonnets and other malicious activity occurring every, single day. And, the more complex the site and the more users it has the more likely it is to be compromised. Cybersecurity is a critical part of national security and our own individual security. We must take it seriously and we must address it.
Now, I’ll be honestI don’t think there is a solution to the problem. I think, though, that there are hundreds of things we can do as individuals, as companies, as nations, as volunteer organizations, as NGOs and as coalitions to solve different parts of the problem. We all need to think about what it is and who’s doing the bad stuff.
It’s common to think of hackers as lonely boys in basements who have too much time and too little to do. Back in the ancient days of the spam wars some folks referred to them as “chickenboners“: beer drinking rednecks who ate fried chicken and threw the bones on the floors of their trailers. The reality even then, though, was that many spammers ran businesses and made a lot of money. Admittedly, the descriptions of how the business was run are cringe inducing and full of illegal activity.
Now, much of the hacking is actually organized crime outside the US. This makes it hard to address successfully through legal channels.
It’s all very complicated. But I think we can agree security is a big deal. We are all part of the solution, by securing our sites and our personal devices. We’re also part of the solution by paying attention to the larger issues and events going on around us.
 
 
 
 

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