Recent Posts

Changes at Spamcop

Earlier this week some ESPs started asking if other ESPs have seen an uptick in Spamcop listings. The overwhelming answer (9 of 11 ESP representatives) said yes. I’ve also had clients start to ask me about Spamcop listings. All in all, there seems to be some changes at Spamcop that means more senders are showing up on the Spamcop radar.
Luckily, Spamcop provides us some insight into their data processing. If you look at the current monthly volume graph, we can see some very interesting changes in data.

The DMA responds

Stephanie Miller has posted over on the DMA blog explaining just what went down with the mailing that got the DMA SBLed over the weekend.
Ken Magill has a pair of articles about the email from the DMA. Oops: DMA spams Spamhaus and others and What we can learn from the DMA.

Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

The DMA kicks spam up a notch
The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List
The DMA Spams A Bunch of Anti-spammers
The DMA sends e-mail that’s memorable, but not in a good way

What not to do when buying lists

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list. Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.

Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving.Mira Grant, Feed
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Compromising a Mail Client

Your entire work life is in your work mail client.
All the people you communicate with – co-workers, friends, family, vendors, customers, colleagues.
Every email you send. Every email you receive. Any files you attach or receive.
If someone can compromise your mail client, they can see all that.
They can save copies of all your emails, data-mine them and use them for whatever purpose they like. They can build a view of your social network, based on who you exchange emails with, and a model of who you are, based on what you talk about.
That companies like Google do this for “free”, advertising supported webmail shouldn’t be much of a surprise by now – but your corporate email system and your work email is secure, right?
What if an attacker were to set up a man-in-the-middle attack on your employees? Install malware on their iPhone, such that all traffic were transparently routed through a proxy server controlled by the attacker?
Or they could use a more email-centric approach, configuring the compromised mail client to fetch mail from an IMAP server controlled by the attacker that took the employees credentials and passed them through to their real corporate IMAP server – that would let the attacker completely control what the compromised user saw in their inbox. As well as being able to read all mail sent to that user, they could silently filter mail, they could deliver new mail to the users inbox directly, bypassing any mail filters or security. They could even modify the contents of email on-the-fly – adding tracking links, redirection URLs or injecting entirely new content into the message.
Similarly, the attacker could route all outbound mail through a man-in-the-middle smarthost that copied the users credentials and used them to send mail on to their real corporate smarthost. As well as being able to read and modify all mail sent the attacker could also use that access to send mail that masqueraded as coming from the user.
Sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect from criminal malware? Not quite. What I’ve just described is Intro, a new product from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will be asking your users to click on a link to install a “security profile” to their iPhones. If they do, then LinkedIn will have total control over the phone, and will use that to inject their SMTP and IMAP proxies into your users mailstreams. The potential for abuse by LinkedIn themselves is bad enough – I’ve no doubt that they’ll be injecting adverts for themselves into the mailstream, and their whole business is based on monetizing information they acquire about employees and their employers. But LinkedIn have also been compromised in the past, with attackers stealing millions of LinkedIn user credentials – if they can’t protect their own users credentials, I wouldn’t trust them with your employees credentials.
You might want to monitor where your employees are logging in to your servers from – and suspend any accounts that log in from LinkedIn network space.
Edit: Bishop Fox has looked at Intro too, and come to similar conclusions. TechCrunch too.

The J.D. Falk award 2013

M³AAWG awarded the second J.D. Falk award today in Montreal. The winner was Gary Warner from the University of Alabama.
Gary has been involved in fighting abuse and online crime since the 1990s. He developed the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research at the University. This is an education program that not only teaches students about online threats and how to fight them, but collaborates with both industry experts and law enforcement.
You can check out Gary at his blog or on twitter.

Experian selling data to identity thieves

If you’re not following or reading Brian Krebs, you should be. He does some of the best investigative reporting in the email, security and internet space. Today’s blog post is a disturbing look into the data selling and identity theft industries. Brian details evidence that shows Experian (yes, that Experian) has been selling consumer data to identity thieves.

Misdirected email

While this does seem to be more common with gmail addresses, it’s not solely limited to gmail. I’ve written about this frequently.

Everything leaks eventually

We have a role address we use to receive support requests from users of our Abacus ticketing system – they’re typically abuse or security desk administrators at ISPs or ESPs, inside corporate firewalls and protected by multiple layers of security and malware protection.
We’ve been using it since around 1997, so we’ve had a good, spam-free run, but in the past few days it’s started receiving botnet originated malware.
If you give an email address to other people, eventually it’ll leak and start receiving spam and malware.