So I’ll highlight another route that cyber criminals take in an attempt to steal your identity during the holiday season, shipping confirmation emails that appear to come from FedEx, UPS or the USPS.  Again, with many gifts shipped from homes and business along with increased online purchases, identity thieves send out spam emails asking you to verify sipping information with your credit card or ask for personal information to receive and confirm packages.  If you ever receive a request online to confirm any account or personal information, you should open a new browser window and type in the sites address, such as www.fedex.com, and then proceed or call their customer service department.

If you think just because  a link in an email says it it from fedex or goes to bankofamerica.com look out.  In my original example of the Bank of America Alert, there is a link to update your account info, but the link actually goes to awilmer.net not bankofamerica.com.  It really is difficult to differentiate between valid emails and phising scams aimed at stealing your identity and personal information.  Remember though that banks, credit card companies and other valid companies will not request personal, account or credit card info by email.

Here is the Bank of America Alerts email for reference:

Dear Bank of America Customer,

This email was sent by the bank of america server to verify your e-mail address. You must complete this process by clicking on the link below and entering your account information . This is done for your protection , because some of our members no longer have access to their online access and we must verify it. To verify your e-mail address and access your bank account, click on the link below.

Update Info  (http://www.awilmer.net/inc/scurepdat/index.html)

Please fill in the required information.
This is required for us to continue to offer you a safe and risk free environment .

Thank you
Accounts Management

Bank of America, N.A. Member FDIC Privacy Promise Terms & Conditions
Copyright © 2009

Email is still at the core of business communications providing exchange of information and documents.  However, document sharing and collaboration has taken on its own specialized applications, servers and platforms.  The biggest concern with collaboration is security and tracking.  In a previous post I wrote about Google Wave and their push to expand collaboration beyond document sharing to live sharing of ideas, text, photos, media… a digital conversation really.  Microsoft has been in this arena for some time and has an established solution in its SharePoint brand.  SharePoint services and SharePoint Portal Server allow for extremely customizable online sharing of documents, projects, teams and more.

Exchange Server 2010 - Unified Communications, archiving, flexibility, data protection and more

Unified communications was a big buzzword several years ago; however, lately it is not thrown around in the media as much as it used to be but it is in practice at most businesses.  In fact Microsoft’s upcoming next version of it ubiquitous Exchange Server 2010 touts unified communications as one of it core features.  Unified communications allows for multiple communication channels to funnel to one platform to access, send and receive email and voicemail.

The recurring themes in this post and many of my previous posts are security and access to content.  As we’ve been hearing with cloud computing and hosted applications (Software as a Service – SaaS) security is an issue that is not fully addressed.  I recently read that even Amazon admits the platform is not compliant to store credit card numbers (EC2 and S3)…  In fact Amazon has come back to clarify their position on security in the cloud after the initial comments.  Hosted Exchange mail with Outlook Anywhere was the first widely accepted hosted solution.  It offers some good features for different businesses: remote access, web interface, mobile device integration, and more.  But there are some industries that cannot  (due to laws, regulation, compliance policies) move their entire organization’s mail to a hosted mail server.  So security will continue to be an issue that will garner much attention from the developers, CIOs & other executives, the media and the tech community.

Accessibility to data and ease of that access is the other theme that seems to play out in many solutions to business need and vision.  Users want to access their documents from the mobile device, whether it is a BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, etc…  They want to document and data to look and function the same on that mobile device (which is really a very powerful mini computer) as it does on their laptop and their desktop.  Something we’ve overcome for business recently was offering not just the ability to view data on mobile devices, but actually manipulate data, run applications and utilize the full functionality of the application from the mobile device.

I’ll trail off on that note for now.  There is so much common ground on the vision and implementation of technology driving business today.  Business evolves, and the businesses that adopt the right technology will reap its rewards…  waxing philosophic about technology, although, I am an engineer

Today I’ve seen some NDR (non delivery report) email messages bounced back to mail servers from earthlink.net:  #5.5.0 smtp;550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked. Write blockedbyearthlink@abuse.earthlink.net>.  So at first I didn’t think much of it assuming it was a false positive and I would get with earthlink and have them review the server and they would see it is not an open relay, not sending out spam, not a dynamic ip address, etc… but when I send a message to earthlink form another mail server domain I got another ndr bounce message: #5.5.0 smtp;550 Unknown local part openrelay in <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>>

Spmahaus - one of the respected spam blocklists to reduce spam from dynamic ip addresses, known spammers, open relays and other offending mail servers.

Now this is when I have to think there is something strange going on because no changes have been made to these mail servers recently and have always been secured from the beginning.  I’ve had complete control over one Exchange mail server from setup and have been administering another of the Exchange mail servers for several years.  So to be sure I checked the cbl and spamhaus blocklists,the mail servers are not listed, I checked the spam database on dnstools and they are also not listed.  I checked to verify they are not seen as an open relay and they are not.  I checked the Exchange mail server settings in ESM.  Nothing has changed.

So, my question is what happens if the spam blocklists get it wrong (the large email providers)?  I’ve had some experience with sites being listed for a day or so due to some change by the blocklists, but were ultimately removed because the mail servers were in fact secure. The real issue in this case though, is that even when I send to request reconsideration for one mail server to be removed I get blocked even when sending from another mail server.  I even tried sending to openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net from my yahoo account and received an NDR from there as well.

So it seems earthlink.net is having some mail server issues at present.

As usual I thought it best to take a proactive approach to resolve this issue and visited the earthlink website to see if I can submit directly from their site or find out more information about their abuse and open relay block lists.  I do not see any message on their site about known issues under the mail server services support area, but I’m sure there are mail administrators and network admins working hard to resolve the issue.