Today the US government unsealed an indictment against 2 Russian agents and 2 hackers for breaking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing personal information. The information gathered during the hack was used to target government officials, security employees and private individuals.
Email is so central to our online identity. Compromise an email account and you can get access to social media, and other accounts. Email is the key to the kingdom.
This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at https://hackerfall.com/story/the-fall-of-an-empire-spammers-expose-their-entire) This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris Vickery discovered the breach back in December and shared the information with Spamhaus and CSO online.
The group has spent months going through the data from this spammer. As of this morning, the existence of the breach and an overview of the extent of their operation were revealed by CSO and MacKeeper. Additionally, Spamhaus listed the network on the Register of Known Spamming Operations (ROKSO).
There are a couple interesting pieces of this story relevant to legitimate marketers.
The biggest issue is the number of brands who are paying spammers to send mail from them. The CSO article lists just some of the brands that were buying mail services from RCM:
Today it was revealed that Yahoo has been scanning people’s email for the federal government.
Read MoreLast week was the 22nd meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). While I am prohibited from talking about specifics because of the closed door nature of the group, I can say I came out of the conference exhausted (as usual) and energized (perhaps not as usual).
The folks at MAAWG work hard and play even harder.
I came away from the conference feeling more optimistic about email than I have in quite a while. Not just that email is vital and vibrant but also that the bad guys may not be winning. Multiple sessions focused on botnet and crime mitigation. I was extremely impressed with some of the presenters and with the cooperation they’re getting from various private and public entities.
Overall, this conference helped me to believe that we can at least fight “the bad guys” to a draw.
I’m also impressed with the work the Sender SIG is doing to educate and inform the groups who send bulk commercial messages. With luck, the stack of documents currently being worked on will be published not long after the next MAAWG conference and I can point out all the good parts.
There are a couple specifics I can mention. One is the new list format being published by Spamhaus and SURBL to block phishing domains at the recursive resolver. I blogged about that last Thursday. The other bit is sharing a set of security resources Steve mentioned during his session.
If your organization is fighting with any messaging type abuse (email, social, etc), this is a great place to talk with people who are fighting the same sorts of behaviour. I do encourage everyone to consider joining MAAWG. Not only do you have access to some of the best minds in email, but you have the opportunit to participate in an organization actively making email, and other types of messaging, better for everyone.
(If you can’t sell the idea of a MAAWG membership to your management or you’re not sure if it’s right for you, the MAAWG directors are sometimes open to allowing people whose companies are considering joining MAAWG to attend a conference as a guest. You can contact them through the MAAWG website, or drop me a note and I’ll make sure you talk with the right folks.)
Plus, if you join before October, you can meet up with us in Paris.