Category: Hosted Email

The Importance of Employee Off-Boarding

83% of employees continue accessing old employer’s accounts

A study was performed by Beyond Identity throughout the US, UK, and Ireland which found that 83% of employees admitted to maintaining continued access to accounts from a previous employer. Also a shocking 56% admitted to using this access to harm their former employer.

The study also states that a professional and details offboarding process can prevent unauthorized access by former employees by eliminating their passwords and other insecure authentication methods. Strangely enough this also creates a sense of goodwill in the company that helps to lessen the motivation for employees to attempt this kind of malicious access. This kind of process is vital considering the current employment market and high turn over rates at almost all companies.

If your company does not have a detailed and documented offboarding process, then contact us for assistance.

How is Malware Delivered?

Read a recent study on the origins of malicious software aka malware. Here are the highlights:

Current Malware Statistics

29% – Malware is previously unknown to security vendors due to the continued efforts of malware creators to hide the software or make it undetectable.

88% – Malware is delivered to people’s inboxes and some of it bypassing normal SPAM filters.

8.8 Days – Time before regular antivirus vendors have discovered the malware and added it to their lists for detection.

$50 – The cost of a pre-fabricated malware kit that can be bought currently on the dark web.

“The most common type of malicious attachments were: documents (Word – 31%), archive files (ZIP & RAR – 28%), spreadsheets (Excel – 19%) and executable files (EXE – 17%).”

What can be done?

A multi-tiered approach to security remains the best solution:

Moving from traditional antivirus to Enhanced Detection & Response (EDR) software to go beyond lists of know infections to behavior tracking of software
Moving from traditional SPAM filters to Email Advanced Threat Protection which scans each email and opens each attachment to see if there is any malicious activity cause by them
Moving from traditional router to a business class firewall with Intrusion Prevention System to monitor traffic for suspicious activity
Employee training is also key to keep your staff aware of immerging trends and threats

If your company is looking to enhance your network security posture, then contact us for assistance.

Warning: Explicit SPAM Messages

Here are a couple recent SPAM emails that were received by clients and myself. They are explicit in nature but they a good lesson about the scare tactics of SPAMMERS. The first message seems to be the better SPAM message as it has better English and is even tries to be humorous, while the second is more direct and extortionary. Time to dissect these messages.

SPAM Message #1

Password – This message starts by stating that it knows your password. How can this be? There have been several information breaches from the government, retailers, healthcare, etc over the past couple of years. The majority of these breaches are eventually posted online with emails and passwords – hence the reason Farmhouse Networking has started offering Dark Web scanning and advises passwords be changed often.
Remote Access – The SPAMMER then goes on to provide a detailed explanation of how they got into the computer. It sounds convincing but deeper analysis by someone who is in the IT Security industry would reveal that their explanation is flawed. To do what they proposed would take several different exploits of various portions of the computer and would likely take longer than video would be playing.
Contacts – For their “computer software” to get contacts from all these various sources would require that the password mentioned earlier in the email be the same for all these services. It is recommended by Farmhouse Networking that different passwords be used for each service so that if one is compromised then the rest are not in jeopardy. It might be asked how to keep track and the answer is a password keeping software like LastPass.

SPAM Message #2

Threats – The message starts immediately with the intimidating remarks and threats. It may be true that alerting the authorities will not bring any immediate assistance, but if we are all upstanding citizens then there is nothing to worry about their threats. It is always good to submit these messages to the authorities (FBI) for analysis so they can take these guys down over time. I do find it sad that this SPAMMER did not take the time to explain how they gained access to my computer.
Webcam – It is very possible that if your computer is infected properly that the hacker could gain access to your webcam, but again if we are upstanding citizens and don’t do anything inappropriate in front of our computers then there is nothing to worry about here.
Bitcoin – The demands continue with a sense of expediency in the matter giving only 28 hours before the big reveal. This particular SPAMMER either knows the value of the first SPAMMERS creativity in producing a video or are selling themselves short at the $400 ransom in Bitcoin. Finally, they even try to give a bit of legitimacy to their claim by stating that they can send the video to a partial list of contacts.

If your company is interested in Dark Web Scanning for on-going breach protection or worried about SPAM, then contact us for assistance.

Is this really SPAM?

Thought that I would share a recently received new SPAM email variant that could easily be overlooked and possibly be a scammer looking to take your money. This one is strange to me and I wanted to share my insites.

Starting from the Top

Look closely at the From portion of the email:

This email is from a legitimate email marketing firm called AWeber. The SPAMMER is actually using a website designed to help bypass SPAM filtering to deliver mail. There is also the fact that the email is form someone that I don’t do business with. Always fight the urge to look at things that are not yours.

Stick to the Subject

Now to take a look at the Subject line of the email:

The email marketing firm this SPAM is sent from is required that you confirm someone who is joining your email campaign. Guess I would have to agree to be scammed by this person.

And now the rest…

The final thing that caught my eye was the title of the email campaign in the email:

The enticing title “Clickbank – 30k project” sounded interesting. By clicking on the button I would confirm my existence as a real person and would likely kick off a communication from someone who is likely an “African Prince” with a money making opportunity. Hope this little tutorial helps you detect other phishing attempts in the future.

If your company is having trouble with SPAM or phishing, then contact us for assistance.

ESET Antivirus Troubles

Working with a webhost to tighten their security settings to get PCI compliant. In doing so we ended up breaking many of their clients email access by turning off SSLv3 and TLSv1.0. I was given the task of helping all the clients fix this issue (see seperate blog post for the fix). One in particular ended up not having issues beyond the normal problems with TLS and it turned out being ESET Antivirus. Here is the story:

Unable to Access Website:

The client first mentioned that they could not access a particular website that they needed to submit government paperwork. The error was related to the certificate being out of date. I checked the site on my own computer and it came up just fine, so looked at their certificate and it was current with plenty of time left before expiring. Cleared the cache and all the normal troubleshooting steps to no avail, so had to dig deeper. Remembered that some antivirus programs scan HTTPS traffic by putting their own certificate in place of the actual certificate from the site. Looked inside ESET Antivirus and found the culprit. Under Internet Protection > Web Access Protection I turned off the HTTPS Scanner. Restarted the browser and was able to surf to the site without issues.

Hidden Messages Stuck in Outlook Outbox:

The client then mentioned that some messages weren’t sending, so looked into it and found a couple messages that were 2MB+ which I told them were too large to send. We got rid of those but then messages were still stuck but were now hidden from view. I used the typical fix for read receipts that are hidden using the MFCMAPI tool but found nothing there. Tried removing the account and re-adding it to Outlook. After the clients 8,000+ emails downloaded via IMAP the same problem began occurring again. Remembering the issues with ESET Antivirus web filtering, I decided to take a look at that again. Under Internet Protection > Email client protection I turned off all the Email Clients, Email Protocols, and Antispam Protection. Restarted Outlook and the problem persisted. Had to remove the account and re-add it to Outlook. After the clients 8,000+ emails downloaded via IMAP the problem was fixed.

All that being said, these kinds of problems are another reason that I recommend Webroot to my clients for their antivirus protection. I prefer to have the Website filtering happen at the DNS level via a company like DNSFilter.com and the SPAM / Email filtering to happen via the email provider or an email protection service like Mailprotector.com.

If your company is interested in using a real layered approach to security not just putting a software band-aid on it, then contact us for assistance.

Configure cPanel Email Distribution Group

The local volunteer fire department wanted to have a feature typically only seen in Microsoft Exchange called Mail-Enabled Distribution Groups, the only problem is that they used cPanel for their cloud email provider instead. So I was tasked with determining if it were possible to create a cPanel email distribution group with similar functionality. To my surprise this is an option and works quite well.

Create a cPanel Email Distribution Group

This tutorial is based on the Go Daddy Pro version of cPanel which is just a skinned version of the standard cPanel control panel.

Login to the cPanel Main Page
Scroll down to the “Email” section and click on “Forwarders”
Click on the “Add Forwarder” button
Here is where decisions have to be made like the vanity name of the cPanel email distribution group can be something like AllStaff or Techs which would go in the “Address to Forward” box. This does not have to be an existing email box as it will be treated as an alias.
In the “Destination” section in the “Forward to Email Address” box type in a list of existing email addresses seperated by commas with no leading or trailing spaces. Click on the “Add Forwarder” to complete the creation process.

It will be easy to see now that the comma seperated list actually was used to create individual rules for each of the existing email addresses. This is a huge time saver in comparison to manually creating each one. This has been tested and verified to work. If your company is using cPanel as your cloud email hosting platform or need help setting up a cPanel email distribution group, then contact us for assistance.

Branded Email using Custom Domain Name

There are many reasons your business needs to use a branded email address using a customized domain name. Let’s look at what the top ones are:

Branded Email Establishes Legitimacy

Customers want to trust a companies before they choose to give their business to them. This is the number one reason businesses should use branded email – not only does it give your business a deeper level of branding, but it establishes the business' legitimacy. This is because your email is often the customer’s first impression of you, especially if email or print marketing had an email for contact. It makes your business look professional and can set it apart from the competition. Phishing schemes are a very real concern these days and many of these fake emails come from people trying to pose as a legitimate business. The best way for your customer to know if the email is really from you or a potentially dangerous location, is by the email address' domain name. If the customer can look at the sender address and see your business’ domain, they will feel more confident clicking links or replying back with sensitive information.

Branded Email Builds Your Brand

A business can never have too much company branding. From business cards to bumper stickers to coffee mugs, there are branding opportunities everywhere. This should includes your business email too. Every time your employees send an email, it reinforces your business brand to the customer. It not only reminds the customer that you have a website, but gives them a peek into what your company is all about.

Branded Email Separates Company Departments

Having a branded email allows you to create multiple email addresses or email aliases for different departments and company objectives. This is a huge benefit as yourname@mycompanyname.com may not always the best address to email or your business may not want the customer to directly contact your employees. It helps compartmentalize the work and make sure that the right person / department receives the correct emails. You can create emails like support@mycomanyname.com, info@mycompanyname.com, sales@mycompanyname.com and many others that can point to one or more members of the organization. It also helps the customer, by pointing them to the right email address for the issue they need addressed.

Branded Email Isn’t Expensive

With Office 365’s Hoste Exchange service your business can add as many individual email addresses and email aliases to your company's branded domain on an as needed basis, access email from anywhere across all major platforms, get industry leading anti-malware / anti-spam filtering built in, send email attachments up to 150MB in size and get 50GB of storage per mailbox. Prices start at just $4 per user per month. Microsoft manages the email server and Farmhouse Networking handles the setup / administration of the rest, which making it simple for you to have a professional branded customized business email address.

If you don’t have a branded email address, now is the perfect time to get one. Small businesses often think they don’t need one or can’t afford it, but that is simply not true. Help your business by setting up a branded email today by giving us a call or email to let our Office 365 experts get your business started on the path to better branding.