Email pranks and spoofing

Earlier today a twitter user calling himself Email Prankster released copies of email conversations with various members of the current US administration. Based on his twitter feed, and articles from BBC News and CNN, it appears that the prankster forged “friendly from” names in emails to staffers.
A bunch of folks will jump on this bandwagon and start making all sorts of claims about how this kind of thing would be prevented if the Whitehouse and other government offices would just implement DMARC. Problem is, that’s not true. It wouldn’t have helped at all in this case. Looking at the email screenshots all of the mail seems to come from legitimately registered addresses at free email providers like mail.com, gmail.com, and yandex.com.
One image indicates that some spam filter noticed there may be a problem. But apparently SUSPECTED_SPAM in the subject line wasn’t enough to make recipients think twice about checking the email.

The thing is, this is not “hacking” and this isn’t “spear phishing” and it’s not even really spoofing. It’s social engineering, at best. Maybe.


Modern mail clients make this kind of thing trivial. They often hide the email address from the user. Mobile mail clients are horrible about this. They often don’t even have the option to look at the actual email address. I regularly put clicking, opening or responding to an email on the back burner until I can get to my desk and see the full message. Often the message is fine. But sometimes it isn’t.
Email is a hostile channel. We, as users, need to treat it that way. I saw a discussion about this on Facebook earlier today. How can we, as the people who contribute to email standards, make it easier to identify spoofs like this? Well, as long as recipients are going to reply to arthur.schwartz@yandex.com or reince.priebus@mail.com as if they were from @whitehouse.gov we can’t. Even Eric Trump somewhat failed when he replied to “donaldtrumpjr.trump@gmail.com” asking if he really sent the email. (Don’t respond, create a new mail to the address you already have from him.)
This is just another example of how humans are the weakest link in any security scheme. Technology can help – maybe there should be a MUA tag that shows whether or not this is an email address (not name, email address) you’ve corresponded with before. But technology cannot save us from ourselves if we’re distracted or negligent.

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DMARC doesn't fix Phishing

Not a new thing, but a nice example just popped up in my inbox on my phone.

 
But FedEx solved their entire phishing problem when they published a strict p=reject DMARC record, right?
This didn’t come from fedex.com. It came from another domain that looks vaguely like fedex.com – what that domain is doesn’t matter, as the domain it’s sent from isn’t displayed to the user on my phone mail client. Nor is it displayed to the user by Mail.app on my desktop, unless you turn off Mail → Preferences … → Viewing → Use Smart Addresses.

That lookalike domain could pass SPF, it could be used as d= in DKIM signing, it could even be set up with DMARC p=reject. And the mail is pixel identical to real mail from fedex.com.
On my desktop client I can hover over the link and notice it looks suspicious – but it’s no more suspicious looking than a typical ESP link-tracking URL. And on mobile I don’t even get to do that.
SPF and DKIM and DMARC can temporarily inconvenience phishers to the extent that they have to change the domain they’re sending from, but it’ll have no effect on the vulnerability of most of your audience to being phished using your brand.

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Tools!

I just added a DMARC validation tool over on tools.wordtothewise.com.

You can give it a domain – such as ebay.com – and it will fetch the DMARC record, then explain and validate it. Or you can paste the DMARC record you’re planning to publish into it,  to validate it before you go live.
If you’ve not seen our tools page before, take a look. As well as DMARC we have a DKIM validator, SPF expander and optimizer, general DNS lookup tools, a bunch of RFCs covering all sorts of protocols, and base64 and quoted-printable decoders.
There’s also a widget that lets you add those little unicode pictures to your subject lines, whether you need a snowman ⛄, a forest ????, or a pig getting closer ???.
The results pages all have easily copyable URLs so they’re pretty good for sharing with co-workers or customers if you need that sort of thing.
(And if you need a cidr calculator, whois, or easy access to abuse.net & Microsoft SNDS check out Al’s xnnd.com.)

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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.

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