Josh Wieder

Scams focused on stealing tax refunds remain highly profitable, despite the fact that they are well known and understood by security professionals and the general public , and have been for years. A variety of distribution methods are used, with the common threads being the use of IRS logos and bureaucratic-sounding language to convince users to click a link, download and execute a file and/or send personally identifying information like a Social Security number. A recent example of one such a scam that I came across is a damning illustration of the failure of online service providers to protect users from obvious and simple malware distribution methods. In the example I wish to discuss today, the distribution method was a spammed email that on a small ISP's installation of SpamAssassin (note: I am not an admin or employee of this system; I'm a customer) received an X-Spam-Status score of 5.3 after being flagged with the following variables: X-Spam-Status: No, score=5.3 re...

What really irks me about this is that I deliberately use gigantic, stupid MTAs like gmail and live mail to deliberately avoid this sort of garbage (deliberately). Those familiar with administrating large volume email can appreciate that you can perfectly configure your mail server and end up bounding all over the place because almost everyone with a mail server is not an actual email administrator and has no clue what they are doing. Email, like high school, is ultimately all about popularity . Even the least competent of email server owners will eventually get tech support to make sure google and microsoft can deliver to and receive from their Zimbra abomination. At least that's what I figured until I started getting bounces like the one below. It seems Microsoft has decided that Security Focus mailing lists are too dangerous. To step up the oddity of this policy, bounces only occur when the originating MTA is with Yahoo. I can receive email directly from securityfocus.com. I c...