Showing posts with the label brian krebs

Krebs: Email Bombs Exploit Lax Authentication

In his latest post, Brian Krebs reports on the exploit-of-the-week that's not really an exploit, depending on how you look at it. This time around, the bad guys are targeting users of a popular ticketing system to bounce their bad stuff into inboxes. What's the Game? It works like this: Bad guy knows that company X uses ticketing system Z. Bad guy sends a forged email to the Z ticke…
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Microsoft Outlook (on Windows) user? Upgrade now!

Brian Krebs posted his usual " Patch Tuesday " update for Fat Tuesday (yesterday, February 13th) and listed in there was a doozy, an email-client specific bug that I almost missed: "CVE-2024-21413, a critical remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that cou…

Brian Krebs on the new ICANN Registration Data Request Service process

Brian Krebs has a grand writeup on the new ICANN thingy (technical term) meant to help folks standardize requests for access to WHOIS data via a new "Registration Data Request Service" process. I'll let Brian give you his good overview and history of what happene…

TLD .us is still full of bad stuff

This is why we can't have nice things. Brian Krebs reports on research gathered by Infoblox showing a massive malware and phishing operation using thousands of short domains in the .us TLD . Stuff like this is why some spam filters treat some TLDs more harshly than others; …

Spammers and scammers and IP address space, oh my!

IPv4 IP address space is just about used up, as the unused pool of IP addresses waited to be doled out is no more . And practically speaking, almost all email sending lives in IPv4 space. (That's an oversimplification -- a few ISPs do support it, but frankly, I would not ca…

Avoid this one specific TLD when choosing your domain name

Apologies for the clickbait headline! I couldn't resist. My intent is to deceive, but only slightly. What is this all about? I was just reading  Brian Krebs and his excellent recent reporting, summarizing and analyzing of data from The Interisle Consulting Group, which show…

Brian Krebs: Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups

Esteemed security journalist Brian Krebs reports on a new software-as-a-service just for bad guys. Need a bunch of email address to verify new fraudulent accounts for different services? This service has got you covered. Click on over to Krebs on Security to learn more . (I'…

Brian Krebs on Email Aliases

It's always good to take a look at email functionality through a security lens. Head on over to Krebs on Security to check out " The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases ," by the man himself, Brian Krebs. ( And a side note to Brian: DALL-E can be great…

Friday fun: Electronic mail fraud and more

There's a term you don't hear every day: electronic mail fraud. Apparently it's just one of a litany of charges brought against four employees of a company called Adconion. Per Brian Krebs : "The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014…

Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King

Brian Krebs reports on the identification of the body of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, "a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi," and adds that "It might be difficult to fathom why, but Hawke may have made a few enemies over the years." Read the article and you'll see…

Beware of questionable and/or bad guys trying to take advantage of you in a rough time

You want the country to open up again? Be careful not to let your haste allow you to fall into the astroturf-driven fake news websites, or even worse, get tricked into giving your personal information out to bad actors.

Krebs: Phishers Are Upping Their Game. So Should You.

Brian Krebs recently published a most excellent article on the current state of phishing and what you can and should do to try to protect yourself as an email user. It's definitely worth a read.

Do you need COI/DOI? Probably.

In case you've been living under a rock, or you've been lucky enough to not be affected, here's the deal: Some bad guys, probably Russian or Eastern European, have decided to mail-bomb unsuspecting folks by signing them up for many hundreds or thousands of mailing l…

FBI Raids Spammer Outed by KrebsOnSecurity

Another spammer put under the microscope! Brian Krebs reports on the FBI arrest of Michael A. Persaud , reported to be one of the world's top ten spammers.

HostWinds: A Turnaround Story

From Brian Krebs comes the story of the fall and rise of internet hosting firm HostWinds . Founder Peter Holden explains how they came to get enticed into hosting spammers, which seemed very profitable in the short term, but turned out to not be so tenable for the long haul. In…

Pre-order Spam Nation by Brian Krebs

From Brian Krebs: "The backdrop of the story is a long-running turf war between two of the largest sponsors of spam. A true-crime tale of political corruption and ill-fated alliances, tragedy, murder and betrayal, this book explains how the conditions that gave rise to thi…

Dutchman Arrested in Spamhaus DDoS

Brian Krebs reports on the arrest made in response to the recent massive distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam group Spamhaus. ( Hat tip: Laura Atkins )

Score one for the Good Guys

The Composite Blocking List, a very popular anti-spam blacklist, reports that the Rustock botnet seems to have been disabled . Spam levels have plummeted as a result. Likely not forever, but it's still nice to see the bad guys struggling. Security journalist Brian Krebs cov…

What is bulletproof hosting?

A friend asked me the other day, what exactly is bulletproof hosting? Laura Atkins has complained before, on this very blog , that Google is a bulletproof hosting provider. Google doesn't exactly fit the criteria, but Laura's frustration was legitimate; stemming from Go…

Ralsky Gets 51 Months in Prison

Alan Ralsky, a pump-and-dump spammer noted by Spamhaus as one of the world's top ten worst spammers for " quite some time ," is off to camp fed for 51 months. Anti-spammers are torn between cheering for his downfall and annoyance that the sentence doesn't incl…