You're kidding me

All the authentication and DMARC in the world can’t save you from stupid.
I just got a survey request from my bank. Or, at least, it claimed to be from my bank.

From: Barclays International Banking Survey <internationalbanking@barclayssurveys.com>

The mail passed SPF (though the SPF record suggests this is being mailed from all over the place) and was validly DKIM signed for barclayssurveys.com. And that domain has a DMARC policy
But there’s nothing in any of that that tells me – or mail filters – that this has anything to do with Barclays Bank.
“barclayssurveys.com” is what’s know as a cousin domain in the phishing world. It’s a domain that has absolutely nothing to connect it to the legitimate domain of the phishing target, but which looks plausible to a recipient.
This one didn’t actually look that plausible, though. The website is hosted on a RackSpace VPS with no reverse DNS configured. The domain is registered by “chime.plc.uk” – whose website is just an Outlook Web Access instance:

The survey it links to – the survey that is asking the recipient about their interaction with a financial institution – doesn’t use SSL. (The webserver it’s running on does speak SSL, so the issue is that they didn’t have a certificate for barclayssurveys.com). The URL it uses and the javascript it’s running suggests it was originally taken from Wix, the free website hosting platform. And it has references to several survey providers in the source that are hidden by CSS.

All of which would be suspicious enough if it came from my local dive bar, but this is coming from an international bank that’s big enough, rich enough and technically savvy enough that they own their own top level domain.
No institution can claim to care about phishing or account takeover as an issue when the legitimate email they send is less plausible than a typical phishing mail. This is just setting up their customers to fall for phishing mail.

And, yes, it’s from a legitimate survey firm. One that’s quite widely used in the United Kingdom and Éire. How do I know it’s widely used? Because the mail they send out leaks information about their customers:

X-Confirmit-FixedSenderDomain: factssurvey.co.uk, feedback-waveutilities.co.uk, feedback-anglianwaterbusiness.co.uk, npowersurveys.com, o2surveys.co.uk, gustosurveys.co.uk, customersatisfaction.rbs.co.uk, customersatisfaction.natwest.com, mail.customersatisfaction.rbs.co.uk, mail.customersatisfaction.natwest.com, panel.uk.com, virgintrainseastcoastsurveys.com, barclayssurveys.com, sunnyloanssurveys.com, sagafeedback.co.uk, boxcleversurveys.co.uk, surveys.ulsterbank.ie, sagafeedback.co.uk, barclays.com, titanfeedback.co.uk, barclaycardsurveys.com, aegonfeedback.co.uk, directionsurveys.co.uk

Just from the names I recognize that’s five major high street banks, a payday loan outfit, several utility companies, travel companies and a major cellphone company that are sending survey email that’s this badly done. And that’s probably just the ones that are being sent from this particular mailserver.
That moment when you type "WTF?" into Google image search
I went back and checked where my bank usually sent email from, and how their authentication was normally set up. The previous mail I got from them was a timely warning about “Phishing” and “Smishing” and “Vishing” warning me to be very careful about clicking on links in mail claiming to be from my bank, for fear of being phished.
It was addressed to “%first name%”.

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That doesn’t mean email security wasn’t a hot topic in 2016. In fact, the use of a private email server was a major topic during the US elections. We also had spear-phishing play a major role in the compromise of campaign systems. I didn’t talk much about that here when it happened, but news reports make it clear that Chairman Podesta and others were targeted for compromise. The NY Times has a more in depth article with broader context around the attacks and how emails were used to infiltrate a major political party.
The irony is with all the time spent talking about how insecure the private server was, that server wasn’t compromised. Instead, the compromise was at Gmail.
We all need to pay attention to our email and how we use it. It also means when we’re sending bulk and marketing email we need to consider the private and personal information we’re putting in messages. Do you send PII? Is there a way you don’t have to? What can we do to protect our brand and our users?
It’s not just bulk email we need to think about, either. Personal email can contain PII, or personal information. A common saying among some of my security friends is “never put in email anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post or NY Times.” That’s an easy thing to say, but the convenience of email makes it easy to share information that we may not want on the front page of either paper. Many of us aren’t actually targets of malicious activity so we don’t have to worry about being targeted the way elected and other officials are. But that doesn’t mean we are not at risk. It just means we’re at less risk than others.
Email is a frequent vector for malicious actors to access computers. Most, if not all of the major breeches in the last few years have started with a phishing attack of some sort. The attacks are planned out and sophisticated. This is not going to get better. The phishers are smart and plan the attacks.  We also need to be more personally aware of security given the current political climate. We need to take steps to protect ourselves more than we have in the past.
Security is more important than ever and we all need to protect ourselves.

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