Message Control

Introducing Your US Department of Justice and FBI Victim Notification System

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Here’s something we really don’t see every day….

We recently received an email claiming to be from the U.S Department of Justice Victim Notification System (VNS)

Subject:     US Department of Justice Victim Notification System
From:     Courtney Walker <fedemail@vns.usdoj.gov>
To:     Business Representative <address>

Our typical “common sense” check for email Phishing Fraud starts with the obvious:

  1. Overly serious/threatening Subject line…. check!
  2. Human sender doesn’t match email address…. check!
  3. Impersonal and generic salutation… check!

The email itself open with:

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.

U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI – New York
26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10278
Phone:  (212) 384-2564
Fax:  (212) 384-4104

more »

OnlyMyEmail Beats 22 Competitors in the Virus Bulletin Spam Challenge

Friday, January 13th, 2012

The results from OnlyMyEmail’s sixth Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge competition have been released.

For the sixth time in a row, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender stopped more spam than any of the 23 competing spam solutions. OnlyMyEmail missed just one single spam message out of 171,963 total, for a new record spam filtering capture rate of 99.9994% besting the previous record of 99.9993% -  also set by OnlyMyEmail in a previous competition.
By comparison, the next best capture rate was McAfee SaaS which missed 41 spam messages. The third best capture rate was AnubisNetworks which missed 97 spam emails.

The average “false-negative” rate among the other 18 filtering systems was a whopping 3,471 missed spam messages and the median was 272.

The results from Virus Bulletin’s VBSpam Challenge have proven, time and again, that for the last year OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender is decisively superior to any other spam defense available today, including hardware appliances, software programs and other Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions solutions as well.

The full list of competitors beaten by OnlyMyEmail includes: AnubisNetworks, BitDefender, FortiMail, GFI MailEssentials, Halon Security, IBM Lotus Protector, Kaspersky Anti-Spam, Libra Esva, Mailshell, McAfee Email Gateway, McAfee EWS, McAfee SaaS, Sophos Email Appliance, SPAM fighter, SpamTitan, Spider Antispam, Symantec Messaging Gateway, The Email Laundry, Vade Retro, Vamsoft ORF, Spamhaus ZEN+DBL and SURBL.

What if someone says they sent me a message but I didn’t get it?

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

We commonly receive questions from users who tell us an expected email has not arrived, and they don’t know how to go about finding it.

Fortunately, with proper information and the right approach, it’s not really that hard to track down missing email messages.

Like snail mail, email follows a path from the sender to the recipient and problems can arise along the way.  When a package or letter hasn’t arrived, it doesn’t make much sense to start yelling at the mail carrier; instead you have to start at the beginning and follow the message from point to point.

Following the chain of possession, the most common causes of missing email are as follows: more »

LinkedIn Shows How To Do “Reset Your Password” Emails Right

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

We’re constantly bombarded with examples of how large well-known companies shoot themselves in the foot with poorly thought out client communications.

They commonly make foolish mistakes that send their messages to the user’s spam folder. Worse yet, many firms practically train their users to fall for the next “Phishing Fraud” campaign that makes it to their in-box.  more »

Miss Freya and the Taliban Virus

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Today, in the “more proof that there’s nothing new under the sun” category, we’re going to discuss the Taliban Virus.

The so-called “Taliban Virus” is a MANUAL virus. A manual virus requires you to voluntarily damage your computer because the virus is not sophisticated enough to do it by itself.

Yes, this is a joke. more »

…Your $50 Coupon to McDonald’s inside! Not!

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

The truth is, this has nothing to do with McDonald’s. The message even says so, if you read the fine print:

The advertisers in this email are not affiliated with any of the above brands.

Apparently it’s okay to pretend to be McDonald’s as long as you put in a disclaimer that says you’re not affiliated with them. more »

Your mailbox is over its size limit – Happy Ending

Monday, October 25th, 2010

We are not fond of URL shorteners because, whether they mean to or not, they help spammers. Spammers like to have a lot of URLs that all go to the same site so spam filters don’t see the same URL over and over and realize it’s spam.

The whole purpose of URL shorteners is to create domain aliases so they’re a perfect tool for spammers. more »

Autentificate your craigslist.org account – Phishing Example

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Today’s new word is autentificate.

As in: “You need to autentificate your craigslist account.”

In this instance autentificate can be defined as “give up the login credentials for” or “compromise”.

As in: “You’d be better off if you didn’t autentificate.” more »

Re: Hotmail! Account Services Member Notification – Phishing

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

One of the disadvantages of having an email address at one of the big free email providers — Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc. — is that everybody wants to steal your account and use it for nefarious purposes.

This explains why another disadvantage of having a free email account is that mail sent from these accounts is often rejected as spam. You get what you pay for. more »

LAST NOTICE: Your Federal Tax Payment ID Has Been Rejected

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

Guess what? The IRS has rejected your Tax Payment ID.

At first we thought this was an attempt to phish EFTPS credentials but after clicking the bogus link to eftps.gov (Warning: don’t try this at home) we found out otherwise. It does eventually send you to eftps.gov but not until after it tries to “borrow” your computer. more »