One of the things I frequently find myself on the lookout for is real life security breaches and the trust model.  However, I also like to see how these things interact with technology and psychology. Part of the problem with spam is that the protocol...

I came across another phishing scam today, the spammer has gone to some trouble to ensure that his site looks legitimate. The fake site In the above, the words “Security Alert” are not centered, but that’s because I had to do a screen capture and move...

When doing IP reputation, generally speaking when you do an IP check, you usually do it on the connecting IP.  The assumption is that the IP sending the mail directly is the one responsible for the IP reputation.  There are exceptions, of course...

A few weeks ago, I changed my Comment posting policy to disable anonymous comments.  Since I have done that, the amount of comment spam I get has dropped to zero.  Before, I used to get tons of it. Unfortunately, there was no facility to disable...

As I was eluding to in my previous post, I have been doing some research on the geographical location of the servers where spammy URLs are hosted. In doing this research, I came across a curious phenomenon which I call the 3+1 scenario – these domains...

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece on where individuals spammers were located in terms of sending IP. The United States was number 1, followed by China. This is in terms of total volume of spam that they send. However, a second piece of data that I did...

Last week, I came across a phishing scam by a spammer who was attempting to impersonate Alliance and Leicester bank in the United Kingdom.  I don’t normally call out banks specifically but I will in this case because of the bank’s poor security practices...

One of our spam analysts saw the following spam today: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxx AldLif tedHisCh in AndNarro wedHisE yes."Th eZenshi aVa r iationS ays,' AFr iendWho Cannot BeRe lie dUponI sWo rseTh an AnEnemy. '" Flo...

Earlier, I blogged that Twitter was DOS’ed last Thursday to go after one guy who goes under the user alias Cyxymu.  I postulated that someone was impersonating Cyxymu in order to discredit during a spam blitz and then DOS’ed various sites where he...

This went unnoticed by me for a very long time, but I was going through some of my personal mail and I discovered that Yahoo is now signing its outbound mail with DKIM in addition to DomainKeys. Long time readers may remember that about two years ago...

Sometimes when watching movies, big Hollywood blockbusters, we are entertained with scenes of bad guys and good guys racing through cities, destroying tons and tons of property and leaving chaos in their wake.  This is supposed to thrill us, of course...

The White House's new Cybersecurity czar Melissa Hathaway has already resigned, according to an article from the Washington Post. Melissa E. Hathaway, who also served as a cybersecurity aide during the Bush administration, had been a contender for the...