Category Archives: spam

Dropbox Employee Account Hack Led to Customers being Spammed

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...

Dropbox this week fessed  up to having been hacked, most notably an employee account that contained project data including a list of customer emails (at least it shows they use their own product). That resulted in a rash of spam that eventually led to the discovery of the compromised passwords.

A couple weeks ago, we started getting emails from some users about spam they were receiving at email addresses used only for Dropbox. We’ve been working hard to get to the bottom of this, and want to give you an update.

Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We’ve contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts.

A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.

They claim it was usernames and password stolen from other sites that led to the trickledown effects on Dropbox accounts. Another reason to use a different password for every site you sign up for.

Their post on the topic includes news of a new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.


Three Reasons to Use Cloud Anti-Spam

Guest Post by Emmanuel Carabott,  Security Research Manager at GFI Software Ltd.

GFI Software helps network administrators with network security, content security and messaging needs

Budgets are stretched thin, you already work too many hours, and you’re always trying to find a server that can run the latest requested workload.

For companies with the flexibility to take advantage of cloud-based technologies, there’s a quick and simple way to win back some time, save some money, and free up some resources on your email servers and reallocate the ones that are running your current anti-spam solution – cloud anti-spam. Here’s how:

Money

Cloud anti-spam solutions require no up-front costs, no hardware, operating system, or software investments, and operate on a simple per-user subscription model. They are a great solution for companies looking to implement anti-spam technologies without a major investment. They keep your costs low, predictable, and easy to allocate. The subscription model means you even have the option to take what has always been considered a capital expense and turn it into an operational expense, which may make your CFO as happy as your CIO would be about the budget you save.

Time

Cloud anti-spam solutions will give you back hours in your week taking care of the infrastructure, but that’s not all. The best cloud anti-spam solutions offer you a user self-service model, where each user can get a daily summary of messages that were filtered out, and can click a link in that summary to release a false positive, or log onto a web portal at any time to check for missing or delayed messages themselves. They get instant gratification and your help desk works fewer tickets related to spam. Everyone wins, except, of course, the spammers.

Resources

Spam, malware, and phishing messages don’t just cost time and money, they can consume significant server resources. Anti-spam solutions running on your email server take a lot of CPU cycles to run filter lists and scan for malware, RAM to expand all those attachments before they can be scanned, and disk space to quarantine what inevitably will be deleted. Moving that entire load to the cloud anti-spam solution frees up resources on your servers, can free up space in your racks, and will save you tons of bandwidth you can put to better use since spam is stopped before it ever reaches your border.

Companies that for legal and compliance reasons, or that prefer to maintain complete control of all aspects of the email system may not find cloud anti-spam solutions are the best fit, but for companies with the flexibility to do so, they are the right choice for IT teams looking to save money, time and resources, and who also want to provide their end users with a great email experience. You’re already stretched thin; give yourself, your team, and your budget a break by choosing a cloud anti-spam solution today.


Controlando el spam, el primer paso lo tienen que dar los proveedores del servicio de correo.

El spam, ¿un problema con solución?El principal origen del spam es la falta de rigidez de los proveedores de servicios de correo para controlar la autentificación en los envíos y de las exigencias de los mismos clientes para no perder los correos que les envían, implementar una solución sencilla y barata de antispam es una acción que debe ser compartida entre los usuarios, aceptando las reglas de juego, y los proveedores de hosting, cumpliendo las normas básicas establecidas de como configurar un servidor de correo.

El problema aparece cuando los clientes exigen el no tener spam en sus cuentas, pero no aceptan que no recibirán correos dirigidos a su empresa desde servidores mal configurados. Continue reading Controlando el spam, el primer paso lo tienen que dar los proveedores del servicio de correo.

El anti-spam en hosting compartido, nunca llueve al gusto de todos…

Muchos usuarios saben que el spam ya ha llegado a ser más de un 95% de todo el tráfico de correo existente en Internet, el último ejercicio se cerró con una media de 12.500 correos de spam recibidos al mes por cada usuario, pero no asumen que por muy buenas políticas que tengan configuradas en los filtros y a pesar de las reglas de anti-spam que tengan configuradas en sus servidores, los que se dedican a enviar spam son unos auténticos profesionales y mejoran día a día, el contenido, la personalización y la configuración del origen de sus envíos, para conseguir traspasar los sistemas, las reglas y los filtros configurados para proteger a los usuarios, utilizan técnicas cada vez más sofisticadas para evadirlos, incluyendo el uso grandes redes de “boots” o “zoombies” para enviarlos desde miles de puntos simultaneamente.

Continue reading El anti-spam en hosting compartido, nunca llueve al gusto de todos…

Mi IP está en spamhaus !!!

www.spamhaus.orgEse es el mensaje de error que aterroriza a los usuarios, de repente no se pueden enviar correos y todo en la empresa se paraliza, nadie sabe que hacer, llamas al soporte de hosting y te dice que es tu proveedor de internet, llamas a tu proveedor de internet y despues de 20 minutos de preguntas, te dicen que el culpables es tu proveedor de hosting y hay empieza el mal humor, pero ¿quien tiene la culpa realmente? Continue reading Mi IP está en spamhaus !!!