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Discussing Internet security in (mostly) plain English
New spamming tactic?
Over the past couple of days, we've seen either the beginning of a new botnet tactic, or we changed...
Author: tzink Date: 09/01/2007
Phishing vs Spoofing
One of things I've noticed amongst the public is the confusion between the terms phishing and...
Author: tzink Date: 08/29/2007
Where has all the pdf spam gone?
I'm checking our statistics on the amount of pdf spam we're seeing, and after Aug 20 (last week) it...
Author: tzink Date: 08/27/2007
Sender authentication part 21: Some recommendations
In documentation that Microsoft is going to release shortly, they have some recommendations on how...
Author: tzink Date: 08/24/2007
Sender authentication part 20: Advantages of PRA vs MAIL FROM
Microsoft is shortly coming out with some documentation on SenderID and the business case for its...
Author: tzink Date: 08/23/2007
Notes on the CEAS
Here's a round up of my random thoughts on the CEAS:1. The stuff on image spam detection was...
Author: tzink Date: 08/15/2007
I haven't disappeared
I've just been busy with a bunch of stuff over the past two weeks. I plan to resume to normal...
Author: tzink Date: 08/13/2007
See you at the CEAS!
Well, today I'm off to the Conference on Email and Antispam, in Mountain View, California. It's on...
Author: tzink Date: 08/01/2007
Sender authentication part 18: More hazards
The other hazard I'd like to look at with regards to SPF and SenderID is the issue of newsletters,...
Author: tzink Date: 07/29/2007
Sender authentication part 17: Hazards of SenderID and SPF
Both SenderID and SPF have their critics. I'd like to touch on two potential problems with them: the...
Author: tzink Date: 07/29/2007
Sender authentication part 16: SenderID vs SPF
SPF and SenderID are similar to each other in the way they act, but the differences between them are...
Author: tzink Date: 07/24/2007
Some notes on PDF spam
I started tracking some statistics on pdf spam this weekend. The following numbers will seem a...
Author: tzink Date: 07/23/2007
Sender authentication part 15: How SenderID interprets SPF records
In my last post, we were introduced to the new SPF record syntax that is specifically designed for...
Author: tzink Date: 07/20/2007
Sender authentication part 14: Introduction to SenderID
Now that we've moved our way through the workings of SPF, let's take a look at Microsoft's own...
Author: tzink Date: 07/15/2007
July 12 - My third year anniversary!
Today is a special day at Microsoft, it is the three-year anniversary of the day I joined...
Author: tzink Date: 07/12/2007
Sender authentication part 13: Some SPF odds and ends
Let’s tie up a couple of loose ends (but by no means all the loose ends) when it comes to SPF. I...
Author: tzink Date: 07/11/2007
Sender authentication part 12: Some examples of SPF
Now that we've plowed our way through SPF, including the syntax (I can't believe I took the time to...
Author: tzink Date: 07/10/2007
Sender authentication part 11: More on SPF Syntax (Continued)
The mx mechanism mxmx/<prefix-length>mx:<domain>mx:<domain>/<prefix-length>...
Author: tzink Date: 07/09/2007
Sender authentication part 10: More on SPF Syntax
Moving onwards to mechanisms, let's take a look at them in a bit more detail. Again, this...
Author: tzink Date: 07/08/2007
Sender authentication part 9: SPF Syntax
This is essentially going to be a summary of the information that appears on the OpenSPF...
Author: tzink Date: 07/08/2007
Sender authentication part 8: Best-Guess SPF
I've had a document sitting on my shelf (ie, the window-sill 10 feet away from my desk) for about 6...
Author: tzink Date: 07/07/2007
Spamhaus spam
This morning I had the distinct "pleasure" of getting spam in my inbox that was pumping the services...
Author: tzink Date: 07/06/2007
More on spam levels
I continue my brief hiatus from sender authentication to comment on the amount of spam we're seeing....
Author: tzink Date: 07/05/2007
Update on spam levels
My original plan when doing the series on sender authentication (which is not yet finished) was to...
Author: tzink Date: 06/29/2007
Sender authentication part 7: Shortcomings of SPF
SPF is a method of authenticating the envelope sender's domain with the IP that transmitted the...
Author: tzink Date: 06/26/2007
Sender authentication part 6: The basics of SPF
In our previous posts on sender authentication, we were introduced to the concepts of SMTP, internet...
Author: tzink Date: 06/26/2007
Sender authentication part 5: More on received headers
We saw in part 2 of this series that when a receiving email server gets the message, it inserts a...
Author: tzink Date: 06/22/2007
Sender authentication Part 4: Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS
Now that we have seen how email headers are inserted by the receiving machine upon receipt of an...
Author: tzink Date: 06/20/2007
Sender authentication part 3: Checking the received headers
In my previous post on the basics of email headers, we saw the basic headers that are inserted by...
Author: tzink Date: 06/20/2007
Sender authentication part 2: Reading email headers
As we saw in our previous post, 5 basic commands are needed for SMTP. When the receiving mail...
Author: tzink Date: 06/18/2007
Sender Authentication part 1: The basics of sending email
This is my first post in my series on email authentication. In order to understand how to...
Author: tzink Date: 06/15/2007
Sender Authentication
In my next few posts, I plan to write a series on Sender Authentication, specifically on SPF and a...
Author: tzink Date: 06/13/2007
Save the inbox, save the world
One of the differences that webmail services like Hotmail has is the ability that it does not...
Author: tzink Date: 06/12/2007
SPAM vs spam
I notice quite often that when people refer to spam (either inside our company or on the outside),...
Author: tzink Date: 06/06/2007
Not one of my better moments
Today was not a great day. A little humbling, if you will.I was asked to participate in a...
Author: tzink Date: 06/06/2007
A quick introduction to Web 2.0
This post isn't all that spam-related, but I think it's an important topic because it represents a...
Author: tzink Date: 06/03/2007
Good news for a change - even my mother gets it
I'm quite proud of my mother. Yesterday, she was listening to somebody on the...
Author: tzink Date: 06/02/2007
June 1, 2007 - Spam breaks to the upside
It's been a long time since we had a really good spam attack but finally we are seeing a good-old...
Author: tzink Date: 06/01/2007
How Hotmail fights spam
In case anyone is curious how Hotmail goes about fighting spam, there is a description of it here. I...
Author: tzink Date: 06/01/2007
One of the world's worst (alleged) spammers arrested
Forbes has an article on (alleged) spammer Robert Soloway, described as one of the top 10 spammers...
Author: tzink Date: 05/31/2007
What happens on Facebook stays on Facebook
I have read some blog posts by other writers about the "questionable" email practises of tagged.com...
Author: tzink Date: 05/29/2007
Hotmail seeing a slowdown in traffic also
I have noted that in the past 5 months, the total amount of mail that we are seeing in the Exchange...
Author: tzink Date: 05/28/2007
If you give stuff away for free, people will abuse it
In what is starting to sound like a broken record, one of my favorite companies, Google, is being...
Author: tzink Date: 05/26/2007
IETF approves DomainKeys as an official standard
The Internet Engineering Task Force, after years of wading through the process, has finally approved...
Author: tzink Date: 05/23/2007
If spam increases one week, what happens the following week?
We sometimes hear on various forums that spam is always on the increase and that email servers are...
Author: tzink Date: 05/21/2007
A new Human-Interactive-Proof from Microsoft Research
I came across an interesting page from Microsoft Research. In it, they talk about a new technique...
Author: tzink Date: 05/17/2007
OCR and image spam
John Graham-Cumming writes on his blog today that perhaps OCRing image spam is having some effect....
Author: tzink Date: 05/15/2007
Sender ID is pretty effective, but on the other hand, so am I
I read the following article that Microsoft's Sender ID hits new milestone for stopping spam. In the...
Author: tzink Date: 05/11/2007