Leaks
Email nightmare for some FSU students
I mentioned yesterday that sometimes people and software screw up in ways that cause problems. Today I saw an article demonstrating just how bad these issues can be. Florida State University Housing Department sent detailed and confidential violation reports to tens of thousands of students.
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.
Fast and loose
Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups.
The news that Representative Bachman may have known that some of her mailing list was taken and used by others is a surprise even to me. I talked with a few ESP reps, though, and they told me that this was mostly par for the course and that they often have a lot of delivery and compliance issues with their political clients. Many have had to suspend or terminate political clients, and a couple people mentioned SBL listings.
This isn’t a problem with just one side of the political spectrum, it seems endemic in how the game is played.
Address leak leads to phishing
A number of people in the industry are reporting getting phishing emails to addresses they used at DocuSign.
There were initial reports of a DocuSign data breach back in December. Now it appears DocuSign is being used as a phishing target.
New security focused services
Steve’s been busy this week working on some new products.
You can see the first at Did Company Leak? This is a neat little hack that looks at social media reports to see if a there are reports of leaks, breaches or hacks and gives you a list of tweets that reference them. And, yes, I did really receive spam to two addresses stolen from iContact customers today.