Tag: Security
How do you fix a bad reputation?
In an earlier post, I had written about the various security measures to take to prevent losing your good reputation.But what happens if you find yourself on someone’s blacklist? What do you do? (Jan 06, 2010)
What is a Honeypot in Email Security Terms?
A Honeypot is, by definition, a decoy or a trap whose purpose is to detect and identify unauthorized use in order to prevent breaches. In Email Security, a Honeypot is a SMTP server setup to process a single domain (or multiple domains) to gather emails all day long. (Dec 18, 2009)
One phish, two phish, red phish, blue phish
Typical phishing messages purport to originate from various financial institutions, delivery services, Facebook, and so on, all with the aim of getting you to click the enclosed link and disclose some personal information that can be abused. (Dec 16, 2009)
Help spammers create new email accounts
You are about to subscribe to a website, a newsletter, get a free email account, or try to download something. You’ve never heard of this site before but it has what you need. Before you can click Confirm, you’re asked to complete a Captcha validation. Okay, no big deal: you enter the string and press “Confirm.” (Nov 30, 2009)
What, me worry?
Incidents of cybercrime via malware and exploits are on the rise, but if this recent poll is to be believed, people are still too blasé about their Internet security. The Unisys Security Index: Global Summary report 1 revealed the following: “Concerns over security in everything from online shopping and banking to safety from computer viruses, as well as national security along with personal and financial security, were significantly down over what was recorded half a year ago for populations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. (Nov 18, 2009)
Anti-Spam, Hacking and Virus Security: How Will Smartphones Survive?
With a double-digit market growth rate, non-existent protection and super-fast communications based on a variety of protocols and media, Smartphones clearly are a future target of choice for hackers and spammers. How will they survive, and at what cost? (Nov 13, 2009)
Do the Crime…Do the Time?
Should Cybercriminals face life in jail? Announced this week in New Delhi, India, cyber-terrorism is now punishable with life-time imprisonment. An amendment was made to the Information Technology Act that was passed in 2008 to now include new-age cyber offences such as identity theft, cyber stalking, and cyber harassment among others. (Oct 28, 2009)
We need spam to sell our anti-spam
The ISP market is a jungle: it’s every man for himself and leave the wounded behind. Some time ago, I subscribed to a big ISP (that shall remain nameless) that was leading the market. When I subscribed, I gave my chosen username for the email address – although it was included with the service I never used it (I didn’t even configure it). The username is a mix of things that make it unique and pretty much unreachable through dictionary attacks, something like 667gptfoo99x@. (Oct 26, 2009)
Drive by Downloads
This is a term I’m seeing more and more frequently in security-related web posts and, frankly, I thought it was fairly new. After doing some research, however, I found an article entitled, Anatomy of a “Drive-by-Download,” that was written in 2004 (!) by Eric L. Howes. Where have I been all this time? (Oct 21, 2009)
What’s the (cyber)world coming to?
Am I the only one who’s getting creeped out by the increasingly sinister tone of the latest cyberthreats making the rounds? Several news items from the past couple of days make me want to unplug my computer and forget I’d ever heard of the Internet. (Oct 07, 2009)
Hello my Friend… My name is Irina
Since “Russian wife” spam is on the rise, I’ll take this occasion to tell you a little story. An old colleague (let’s call him John) answered one of those messages about 2 or 3 years ago, just to see how things would go. The “girl” replied very quickly, and they soon began chatting about almost everything. (Oct 05, 2009)
Email Security Gateway Deployment: Avoid These Common Mistakes
Don't declare your primary mail server (MTA) as a secondary MX. (Oct 02, 2009)
Top 5 Things to Distrust About Email
These are all very basic rules that a savvy person already knows. But if everyone already knows them, why are there so many scammers out there and how are they able to make so much money? (Sep 23, 2009)
Spam’s future from the New School of Information Security
Will Spam ever stop? Some thoughts on spam economics from the New School of Information Security.
Adam Shostack (currently at Microsoft in the role of security program manager and with whom I worked on a security audit of the service delivery platform at Radialpoint) and Andrew Stewart recently published The New School of Information Security. (Sep 11, 2009)
Where does your data go when you’re not looking?
So it’s time to review and update your network security and you're preparing the budget. You’ve included the costs for hardware peripheral devices, anti-malware solutions, maybe encryption, etc. But what about a lawsuit - did you factor that into the bottom line? (Sep 09, 2009)
SPF woes with third party services … a workaround.
Many people use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) as an anti-spoofing measure. They create an SPF record in their DNS zone for their domain. From time to time though, some customers will do business or use third party services that will send out Email on their domain's behalf and unfortunately, this will cause recipient MTAs to hard-fail or soft-fail these messages. (Sep 04, 2009)
Security Software Revenue Up 18.6%
Worldwide, the key drivers for fueling the growth of IT security spending are data security and privacy and the need to protect IT infrastructure from the ever-increasing sophisticated and targeted attacks. For North American and Western European Organizations, compliance was one of the major drivers. (Aug 28, 2009)
“ElephantGate” and other stories
Ah the “Dog Days” of August! Give me a hot, sunny day, a comfortable lawn chair and a really good spy novel, and I’ll get lost for hours. But who needs books these days? A recent article about corporate espionage reveals a wealth of true-life - and often truly bizarre – tales. Move over James Bond, the company janitor has cool gadgets too! (Aug 26, 2009)
Security Back to Basics
You can use Windows Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) for firewalling purposes. It's fairly simple to setup as well. (Aug 21, 2009)
Researchers simulate million-zombie botnet
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California, headed by Ron Minnich and Don Rudish, were able to boot more than one million kernels, or the central component of most operating systems, as virtual machines in a massive botnet simulation. Previously, researches had only been able to create a simulated botnet of up to 20,000 nodes. (Aug 19, 2009)
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)
