Filed under Email
Tagged as Email, Spam, spamassassin
The Apache SpamAssassin spam filter has been shipping with a rule which defined any year past 2009 as “grossly in the future” and adding 3.2 to the email’s spam score. The default threshold for spam is 5.0, so the error makes it much more likely that legitimate mail will be falsely marked as spam.
The problem was noted by Mike Cardwell, a UK based developer, who brought up the issue on the spam filter’s mailing list. The problem had been reported in 2008 and fixed in the SpamAssassin repositories, but the rules were not backported to 3.2 for users until new years day when the omitted update was noticed.
SpamAssassin users will need to run the sa-update command to update their rule set. If they are unable to do this, for whatever reason, then adding score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0 to the local.cf file will work around the problem.
Source: H Online
Filed under News
Tagged as bush, Email
White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the Associated Press.
The discovery was announced Monday by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, over the e-mails in 2007.
The two groups had initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request for e-mails in the wake of a scandal involving the Justice Department, which had fired U.S. attorneys around the country in an apparent political bid to rid the department of prosecutors who didn’t adhere to the White House’s conservative agenda. The missing e-mails were also potentially crucial to the investigation into the Valerie Plame–CIA leak scandal.
The groups eventually filed lawsuits after the EOP revealed that it had lost about 5 million e-mails from its servers between January 2003 and July 2005, because the e-mails had not been archived properly per the Presidential Records Act. Among other things, CREW sought records about the EOP’s e-mail management system, about retained and missing e-mails, and about any audit reports that might have revealed potential problems with the e-mail system.
The newly discovered e-mails were apparently mislabeled and were recently uncovered by contractors hired by the White House. The e-mails will eventually be made available to the public, after they are archived through the National Archives and Records Administration.
Source: Wired
Filed under Security
Tagged as Email, Phishing
Banks and financial institutions are fond of lecturing customers about the perils of phishing emails, the bogus messages that attempt to trick marks into handing over their login credentials to fraudulent sites. Yet many undo this good work by sending out emails themselves that invite users to click on a link and log into their account rather than going a safer route and telling users to use bookmarked versions of their site.
The problems of the former approach are neatly illustrated by a blog posting by Randy Abrams, a former Microsoft staffer who is now director of technical education at anti-virus firm Eset. Abrams complained about the inclusion of a link in an email from PayPal as it looked rather too much like a phishing email.
PayPal support staffers responded not by noting that Abrams may have a point, which it would consider, but by treating its own email – which it acknowledged was “suspicious-looking” – as a phishing attack.
“Not even PayPal support can tell the difference between a legitimate PayPal email and a phishing attack,” Abrams notes.
Source: The Register
Filed under Hacks
Tagged as Email, Hacks, palin
Sarah Palin has described the hack of her webmail account as the “most disruptive” event in her campaign to become US vice president last year.
Palin singles out the hack into her Yahoo! web account as “the most disruptive and discouraging” incident in the presidential campaign in her new book Going Rogue: An American Life, leaving in the dust other issues that blighted her GOP campaign with John McCain such as controversies around her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy and her inability to handle questions about foreign policy.
The compromise of her personal webmail account in September 2008 “created paralysis” by severing easy communication with her “Alaska staff”, according to the former Alaskan governor. This admission supports claims that the webmail account was used to conduct state business and may therefore aid the defence of the alleged hacker, David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state legislator in Tennessee.
Source: The Register
