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Fake "Bill Gates" Message Dupes Top Tools
yahoi writes with this excerpt from Dark Reading that might raise sysadmins' eyebrows about email security, in particular given the big names involved: "A researcher who conducted a successful spear-phishing experiment with a phony LinkedIn invitation from 'Bill Gates' is about to reveal the email products and services that failed to filter the spoofed message — and that list includes Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Express, and Cisco IronPort. ... The experiment was aimed at measuring the effectiveness of email security controls in several major products and services. And the simplicity and success of the test demonstrated just how powerful social engineering can be and what little technology can actually do about it, security experts say."
Well here's why that's tough. You can't check the email address it comes from typically because that would mean using the VRFY command, which no modern email server has enabled because it would allow spammers to simply poll an SMTP server for addresses and see if they are legit. They simply disable it or send all true responses.
The next check is DNS, verifying a mail record exists for the domain in question. Here's the problem with that. DNS can be messed up and mail will still function. Say you have a hosted domain but it lacks an mx record. Mail will still go out. So the server on the other end needs to make a choice. Throw it away or pass it through.