Archives: May, 2010
May Email Security News: New Undersea Cables Feed African Botnets
Email Security Industry news from May 2010 with commentary (May 31, 2010)
Are Canadian spammers above the law?
I certainly hope not. Ever heard about that guy, Adam Guerbuez? Using some scripts, he sent over 4 million spams through Facebook’s Wall in 2008. After being sued by Facebook under the CAN-SPAM act, he was found guilty (Guerbez didn’t even bother showing up for the trial) and was charged a 873M$ fine. That turns out to be about a BILLION Canadian Dollars. (May 28, 2010)
Interesting question from a customer: “Why should we block .EXEs?”
The majority of phishing attempts with drive-by-downloads try to entice you to download EXE files and run them locally. EXE files should always be blocked. You can open certain files on a case-by-case basis and in a very controlled fashion, but that’s the extent of it. (May 26, 2010)
SURBL: The catch of the day
There it is again: another email in your Inbox from an obscure financial institution, requesting that you click on the available link and be redirected to an unknown, unsecured website. Prompted for personal details or your credit card number, you hesitate to enter this information thinking something seems fishy. (May 19, 2010)
Here come the spam police
The German courts may have just opened the floodgates. Their top criminal court ruled this week that home wireless users can be held responsible for not password-protecting their wireless connections. If the unprotected connection is used for illegal file downloads, the owner can be fined up to 100 Euros (currently $126). (May 17, 2010)
Most Common Support Issue: Whitelist = Spoofed Spam
No one likes to see spam in their Inbox, especially when it comes from themselves! Users often get confused and even worry that their identity has been stolen. The main cause for this is that they have whitelisted their own email address to bypass scanning for outbound traffic. Users do not realize (or understand) that spammers can spoof their email address and send spam that appears to be from themselves. (May 14, 2010)
Facebook or Faceblock? Facebook implementing their own ‘email security’?
Facebook is coming under scrutiny (again!), this time about their email scanning policies. Most of you are probably in the email security industry and are well aware that any email security solution will scan a message to divert or block spam, phishing, etc. (May 12, 2010)
Think you don’t spam? Think again!
Who has never sent email spam? Maybe you wanted to promote something, contact friends or relatives you never really emailed before (at least with a normal email), send a chain letter that promised success and money or to promote a garage sale using your local hockey team email list? Maybe you sent a message for your business using a large contact list grabbed on a corporate email with a multitude of CC’d addresses? Or did you ‘borrow’ the customer list from work for your own use? (Oh, that’s bad!) (May 05, 2010)
Your mail server might not be the cause of delivery problems
Most support people have seen every mail server configuration possible, and others that would have been considered impossible. No matter whether the operating budget is very tight, mega-sized or somewhere in between, people often try to throw everything onto a single server, including the kitchen sink. Well, that kitchen sink is often the cause of email blockage, rather than the actual mail server program. Even a honking new machine with mega-sized specs can have performance problems if it becomes bloated with unnecessary and/or resource hogging apps. (May 03, 2010)
More Recent News
Recent Spam Survey Winners
We are extremely pleased with the tremendous response that we have received to this point from our Fight Email Spam survey. As promised we have randomly selected winners of our gift card prizes. (Jan 23, 2012)
New Year's Resolution
We spend 8 to 10 (or more) hours a day at work - more time than we spend anywhere else - and our desks/workspaces are becoming our kitchen tables. But, do you realize that our desks are covered in more bacteria... (Jan 20, 2012)
Email Usage Survey
We are currently conducting a market research on email usage at work. Thank you for filling our this very short survey. (Jan 12, 2012)
