According to a recent report from brand reputation firm MarkMonitor, phishing attacks reached a record high of 151,000 unique attacks during the 2nd quarter of 2009.
They want your login info
Favorite subjects and themes of phishing emails sent out in Q2 of 2009 include those which appeared to be from social media websites (up 168% from last year), and most commonly (4 out of 5 of all phishing attacks) from financial/payment service-related businesses. Almost all phishing emails are sent with the intent of tricking unsuspecting recipients into giving up their login information to various websites, thus severely jeopardizing the security of those who fall prey to such attacks.
The land of the free, and the home of most phishing sites
According to the report which looked at the number of unique Phishing sites, 50% originated in the United States — significantly more than any other individual country.
Conflicting data…who has it right?
The rise in attacks from phishing sites as reported by MarkMonitor conflicts with data which was published by IBM in August of this year. IBM claimed that attacks from phishing sites were actually on the downfall. This difference of opinion could be explained by looking at how the data was collected. IBM looked at phishing email as a percentage of spam, while MarkMonitor based their numbers off the number of unique URLs used by phishing sites.
How to prevent phishing attacks
- Use a spam filter to stop phishing emails from reaching your inbox
- Always be very careful to only open email from trusted senders
- Never click links in emails that seem even remotely suspicious
These latest figures show that phishing is still a big problem. Unless everyone gets wise to the tactics of the phishers (which is unlikely), phishing will continue to threaten the security of individuals and organizations worldwide. Be safe, and be prepared.
When most of us hear of identity theft we first think of someone stealing information from our garbage can and using it to open an account. While personal identity theft is a real threat, many small business owners fail to realize that their business is subject to identity theft as well.
Many of us try to keep our personal data hidden from others; however, as businesses we often times promote pieces of this private data – address, contact information, phone number, and even business license number.
Just as you do in your personal life, it is important to take steps to protect your small business from identity theft. Some basic steps include:
1. Check your business credit report
2. Be sure to have an email security system in place to prevent spam, viruses, and phishing
3. Lock down the network – firewalls, encrytion
4. Shred important documents (dumpster diving is still common)
According to a Panda security report, a surprising 29% of small businesses don’t have a spam filtering solution. Additionally, 16% of small businesses do not have firewalls.
You can read more on small business (SMB) identity theft in the following CIOZone article.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a recorded call that starts off “Your car’s warranty is about to expire….” The first time I got one of those calls it scared the daylights out of me. I had thoughts of my transmission dropping out while driving my kids around. My kids aren’t mechanics and neither am I so we’d be in quite the pickle. The calls keep coming to your phones, home and mobile. How annoying is that? All I could think was that these guys are spamming me through my phone.
Well, there’s good news. Next Tuesday the feds will make it illegal for telemarketers to use robocalls. “American consumers have made it crystal clear that few things annoy them more than the billions of commercial telemarketing robocalls they receive every year,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news release. You got that right! Just like spam we don’t have the time or patience to deal with this junk. The feds also enacted CAN-SPAM a few years back to deal with spam messages. It’s estimated that close to 90% of all email traffic is junk mail. Hopefully, the robocalls perpetrators won’t decide to move their operations offshore and use crazy call-routing schemes to keep the pressure up to persuade consumers they need new car warranties.
After next Tuesday I can rest a little easier. I won’t have to screen my calls as diligently as before. I only wish this law had included the annoying political phone calls that come around each election cycle. Oh well, no law is perfect but it’s a start.
In an effort to generate large volumes of spam, a latest phishing attack is targeting South Carolina college students and staff, the FBI reports. The scam is asking for the student’s user ID and password which is needed for a server repair – do not respond.
Anyone suspect of any phishing scam should not respond to the email. They can report a suspicious email to the FBI at www.ic3.gov.
This latest warning reminds us that the spam industry is a lucrative business and we all need to be vigilant with regards to protection. The current volume of malicious emails flowing through the internet is above the 90% level. Obviously, we would recommend using managed email security company with advanced spam filtering as a first line of defense against these type of attacks.
Hurricane Bill is churning in the Atlantic and threatening Bermuda and the East Coast. Hopefully it will weaken and not cause any damage. Most businesses prepare to protect themselves from the damage these storms can inflict. However, there are numerous accounts of businesses being ill prepared to continue operating after the storm has passed because of an oversight in their business continuity planning.
Email is a preferred communication method. However, email continuity is often overlooked as part of the complete business continuity planning process. Hurricane winds, flooding, fire, etc., can knock an email server out of commission.
Mailprotector’s services – spam filtering and hosted exchange – provide business continuity in the event of mail server outages. Our Scan and Forward service provides mail queuing for up to 7 days if your mail server goes offline for any reason. Once your mail server is back online then your queued messages will be delivered. What if your on-premise mail server will be off-line for longer than 7 days or you need immediate access to your email? We can provide our Advanced Scan and Store service that gives you access to your email via a secure webmail console.
The value of our mail queuing was underscored by one of our customers back in July of 2007. England had been experiencing some of the worst flooding on record, and the shutdown of electricity substations in their region was ordered as a safety precaution. This meant that they had to power down all of their UK-based servers. Mailprotector’s availability protector kicked right in and bailed them out:
“Thanks to Mailprotector’s automatic message spooling we were able to build a replica environment in our US datacenter and be back up and running this morning without any customers experiencing loss of inbound emails.”
Mailprotector’s services are ideal for business continuity and should be made a key component for your business continuity planning.
As we approach the end of summer, Mailprotector Security Center reports that spam rates remain high. During the last four weeks, the spam rate for all email traffic flowing through the Mailprotector security system reached one of the highest levels at 96.1%. The report also notes that the preferred method of attack from spammers is the Dictionary Harvest Attack – DHA.
Also known as a “Directory Harvest Attack”, the DHA is becoming a much more frequent occurrence. The most important commodity for a spammer is a valid email address. As users become more cautious about the disclosure of their email address, valid addresses are becoming harder to come by.
In a typical DHA the spammer will use a “dictionary” of hundreds of thousands of common names and name combinations to continually query a non-secure email server. The spammer will not attempt to send a message, but simply ask the receiving server if it will accept a message for the particular address. The spammer then waits to see if an error message is returned. If one is not, then the spammer now has a valid email address that can be used and sold to other spammers.
As part of our exchange spam filtering service, Mailprotector provides comprehensive security from DHA and other SMTP-based server attacks. Head over to http://www.mailprotector.net to learn more about this and other services that Mailprotector offers.
The other day I got an instant message from a friend who franticly told me “I keep getting spam from myself!” He went on to explain that his torch and pitchfork-carrying co-workers were also seeing the same thing.
One thing led to another, paranoia grew into pandemonium, and before they knew it everyone was throwing around the “R” word. Thankfully, before they “reformatted” every computer on their network with hopes of closing the door on the supposed hacker, my friend wisely called on me (his buddy in the email security business) to offer some insight. “Worry not my friend. Worry not.” I confidently exclaimed . “All you’re seeing is a spoofed email address, nothing more.” As I went on to tell him about the ins and outs of email spoofing, his mind was put at ease and his company’s network-wide reformat was safely averted. But what exactly is email spoofing? I’ll explain to you as I did to him.
What is email spoofing?
Email spoofing is a tactic that spammers use to make your email server think that you are sending a message to yourself, therefore it is “OK” to let the message through. In actuality the messages are not from you…it just looks that way. Wikipedia explains it well:
E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe (usually fraudulent) e-mail activity in which the sender address and other parts of the e-mail header are altered to appear as though the e-mail originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), ill-intentioned users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. The result is that, although the e-mail appears to come from the address indicated in the From field (found in the e-mail headers) it actually comes from another source. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spoofing)
How common is email address spoofing?
Spoofed addresses are extremely common because of the high rate of successful delivery when sent to unprotected email addresses. A quick check of my own spam quarantine shows that in the past 30 days alone, Mailprotector’s spam filter caught 52 spam messages that look as though they were sent from my own email address. These messages account for over half of all the spam in my quarantine for that time period. Thanks to Mailprotector I have never received even one of these annoying pieces of email in my inbox, but my friend and others like him don’t fare so well. Many email users get spam from a spoofed address that looks like their own on a daily basis.
Is email spoofing dangerous?
Not always, but it definitely can be. Spoofing an email address is as easy as putting a forged return address on a package or envelope, and (in much the same way) it’s the contents you have to watch out for. Messages that use email spoofing to get from point A to point B may contain content that’s simply annoying, such as links to canadian pharmaceutical websites. On the flip side such messages may also contain viruses, trojans, worms, or links to phishing websites that are standing by to automatically install harmful malware as soon as you click.
How to stay safe from email spoofing
The best practice when it comes to spoofed email addresses is to simply never open an email if it’s from your own address. Just delete that sucker and move on. Even better yet, use a good email security service to filter out emails that use advanced address spoofing tactics. If you go with a managed solution such as Mailprotector, they will be blocked before they ever even get to your email server. Nice.
by Bruce LaFlam on July 30, 2009
At Mailprotector, we have seen the technically savvy spammer community become more sophisticated and operate in ways that require swift response. With the ability to respond quickly to threats, it makes sense that cloud based or hosted spam filtering companies are growing at at rate faster than the other potential email security solutions: software and appliance.
At the Black Hat Vegas security conference this week, Cisco chief security officer, Patrick Peterson, confirms what we see on a daily basis – spammers are fast.
“Cybercriminals hunt prey with a velocity that’s impossible for legitimate businesses to match”
With hosted email security, businesses can be sure that there is a team of security professionals monitoring and adjusting to threats 24/7.
Byron Acohido in a USA Today story shares more from the Black Hat Security Conference. You can read his story here.
by Jeremy Nigh on July 29, 2009
A recent report from Messagelabs shows that spammers are now utilizing automated translation services to translate their messages into other languages, allowing for them to target more countries with the same content with little extra effort on their part.
Free, online translation services have become a favorite of 419-type advance-fee fraudsters. Only recently though, have general spam senders also adopted these tactics as their own. Some countries who have enjoyed better email security before now are seeing a dramatic rise in the level of spam due to the translation of messages into their native tongue.
Spam levels in Germany and The Netherlands have risen by 13% since May of this year, with spam now representing over 95% of all email traffic globally. According to the report, “…in Germany 46.5% of all spam is in German and 2.5% in French. In The Netherlands, 25% of spam is in the Dutch language while in France, 53% is in French and 4% in German. In Japan, 62.3% of the spam is found to be in Oriental non-English languages and in China, this number is 54.7%.”
Despite the influx of non-English spam, however, the report also shows that around the world most spam is still targeting the English language. In July only 1 in every 20 spam messages was in a non-English language.
by Bruce LaFlam on July 24, 2009
In recent months, our company which provides a spam filter and hosted exchange service has been investing resources into social media. With marketing dollars (and time) in limited quantities these days, it’s important to ask “is social media here to stay and will there be a return?” In a story posted on USAToday.com, Forrester Research shares some insight into the future of social media. Read the entire article here.
The money that businesses spend on social media now is growing faster than any other form of online marketing. Some 25% of small businesses surveyed by Ad-ology Research said they would spend more on social networking in 2009, beating the numbers who’ll spend more on e-mail, blogging or company websites. Forrester Research projects the $455 million that companies spent on social networking in 2008 will balloon to more than $3.1 billion by 2014, a growth rate more than three times what it forecasts for e-mail marketing.
USA Today
So, marketing decision makers should be comfortable knowing that social media will be growing strong for years to come.
