Child Porn Accusation As Online Extortion Tactic

Glenn writes "There's a story on silicon.com about a new twist in the tactics used by online extortionists trying to blackmail ecommerce sites with denial of service attacks. Yesterday one blackmailer threatened to send out child pornography emails in UK gambling site Blue Square's name if it didn't pay up 7000 Euros." This sounds even worse than simple DoS threats.

Comments

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[ajs]

There's nothing wrong with SMTP... The problem lies with the lack of consensus on authentication, authorization and reputation systems for electronic mail.

For example, using a combination of SPF and SMTP/AUTH you can easily prevent anyone who uses SPF from accepting invalid mail "from" your domain(s) while continuing to use the world's most pervasive mail transfer protocol.

Problem is that people aren't willing to apply the time and effort required to do this globally.

The next step is reputation, and as soon as you can be sure that the person claiming to be joe@example.com is in fact from example.com, you can begin assigning example.com a reputation. You'll see dozens of distributed reputation databases, just like IP-based blacklists, overnight.

Want to move the process along? Add an SPF record for your domain and add an SPF milter (or equivalent for your MTA technology) to your mail server. The sooner forgeries stop, the sooner we can start building reputation and end this.