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Fortune 1000 Companies Sending Spam, Phishing
An anonymous reader writes "The Register takes a look at spam touting everything from Viagra to phishing sites being sent from Fortune 1000 networks. Oracle was found to have a machine pushing out a PayPal phishing scam, and BestBuy had a system sending thousands of spams a month. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog also is tracking this story, finding stock spam being pumped from ExxonMobile and from American Electric Power, among others. Another machine at IndyMac Bank was the source of spam touting generic prescription drugs. From the story: '...an IT engineer with American Electric Power, said the stock spam came from a bot-infected computer belonging to a contractor at one of its power generator plants.'"
finding stock spam being pumped from ExxonMobile
This is no spam, this is an actual stock push you insensitive clod!
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Port 25 is usually for server to server SMTP transmissions.
If you're an end user, you should have a username/password and be using port 465 or 587 (or whatever your email admin setup).
That is why companies should block outgoing port 25 connections from everything except there own mail servers.
I seriously hope you are being sarcastic. If I ran across a firewall admin on any corporate network allowing outbound 25 from anything but the corporate email servers I would suggest canning their asses in a heartbeat. It is just stupid on so many levels. First of all checking personal email from work should be on the top 10 things of "you aren't allowed to use the corporate network for this", beyond that, outbound 25 has precious little to do with that anyways, unless they are running an email server on the corporate network in which case that should be #0 on the list since #1 assumes that your employees aren't stupid enough to use your corporate resources to run personal servers, either way a good firing would fix that in a hurry. Honestly, since most corporate networks these days are using exchange boxes, they shouldn't even really be allowing outbound 25 from ANYTHING on the internal network. A good admin will have a secured relay be it part of the firewall or a sun box or something other than allowing the win/exchange boxes from talking directly to the net.
You can argue morale issues until you are blue in the face, network security should trump that in 99% of those cases. The enterprise network exists for the sole benefit of the enterprise. Personal email, instant messages, myspace, what the hell ever, has a risk that FAR outweighs any potential benefit. If your employees can't leave their email/myspace/im friends for 8hrs a day you should probably find employees who can. There is plenty of websurfing around that doesn't involve grotesque breeches of security to keep people entertained while they are being productive. If the company is paying you so little that you can't afford your own internet access you should probably find a new job.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The PC hadn't been turned on in about 6 months. Apparently the dude who I was replacing was into Russian brides and err, certain types of ethnic pr0n, and had got the sack for various dodgy reasons 6 months prior to my instalment. Anywho, in the 6 months that this computer was un-manned, my company installed Norton across all other PC's.
My 2nd day was interesting, when I first turned on the computer. EVERYONE who had the Norton running detected all sorts of network worms and virusiis's (:P) the second I'd booted into Win XP. I thought,
"Oh crap, here we go. Time to clean up this mess..."
and began a search for *.jpg. Kapow, tonnes of hairy pr0n, selected all and shift deleted.
Next, it was time to install the company antivirus software, which was Norton. The next couple of days were spent trying to free my infected system of all sorts of goodies. I started by enabling the Norton Mail Monitor, and oh my, how funny!
"Scanning out going mail, Scanning out go-Scanning out going mai-Scaning out g-Scan"
The WHOLE screen filled up with Norton "scanning out going mail" boxes, like, 100's of them. This was my first job outside of the IT industry, and a big WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD for me. So yes, what's the point of my story? Well, Russian brides are hairy. OH, and not all companies have IT departments, let alone competent IT staff who can source and cease zombie machines from operating.
Actually, here's another thought for you: how many got pwned by other means, but are affraid that some "lusers are idiots" type will blame it on porn? I've only skimmed through the thread and I already see two blanket generalizations to the effect that, respectively, (A) infections come from porn surfing, and (B) the user is lying through his teeth if he's saying otherwise.
The fact is, there are so many ways to get pwned today, it's not even funny. Email attachments, trojan programs packed as some cutesy screen server or utility you can download, phishing-like schemes where you're sent to a page chock-full of IE exploits, warez sites (tend to be worse than porn as infection risk goes), spyware serving ads with exploits in them, or rarely a genuine site or ad provider getting pwned and helping spread exploits (don't assume that _only_ spam zombies can possibly ever get installed when security is breached), etc.
Yes, you can say that they should have known better, but it's still not porn. And it sometimes comes with the endorsement, real or faked by a trojan who took over a friend's address book, of someone they know. E.g., every company has a wiseguy or two setting up some jokes mailing list and forwarding there anything he receives, indiscriminately, including links to other sites. And by indiscriminately, I mean here one even managed to forward a couple of business emails to that list.
Then there are malicious insider jobs. There are cases of sheer idiocy on the part of some techie or programmer or PHB. (You can occasionally read advice even on
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You can argue morale issues until you are blue in the face, network security should trump that in 99% of those cases.
That's a classic example of IT narrowmindedness. If the employees no longer care, no technical measures will secure your data. Security is everybody's business, not just yours. People will naturally protect that which they care about. No morale = no security.
As you seem to be from the school of "a good firing will fix anything". Hopefully for your own sake your boss wises up and uses a 'good firing' to adjust your attitude, because I doubt anything else will penetrate that skull.