" forged Archives - LuxSci

Posts Tagged ‘forged’

Ask Erik: Is this email fake? How can I tell?

Thursday, December 28th, 2017

In a recent “Ask Erik” question, Eve asked:

“I received a copy of an email that someone claims they sent to me. They did not forward this apparent email they claim they sent to me. Rather they copied and pasted it into a current email.

However, I did not receive this email, and in all honesty this apparent copy of this email looks fake. I believe I could easily create this type of fake email myself. So, is there a way of telling whether someone has faked an email which they claim they sent to you? And, should I insist that the original email they claim they sent to be is forwarded to me and not copied and pasted?”

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Tags: email, fake, forged, forged email
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Tracing the Origin of an Email Message — and Hiding it

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

We are often asked by our users to help them determine from where an email message has originated. “Where did this spam come from?”

In general, it is fairly easy to do this if you have access to the “headers” of the message.  In this post, we will show you how to determine a message’s original location yourself and also how you can protect yourself from others determining your location when you send email messages to them.

Why would you need to protect yourself — If you are traveling and do not want people to know where you are; if your messages are not going through because your ISP is blacklisted or has a poor reputation.

 

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Tags: anonymous, anonymous email, forged, location, origin, received, Received header, smtp, webmail
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy, LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Email Identity Protection and LuxSci Email Hosting

Monday, March 9th, 2015

We have just completed a long series of articles discussing how attackers forge email messages and what technologies and techniques can be used to counter these attacks.  See: Email Identity and Forged Email.

In this post, we will discuss some best practices when using LuxSci to maximize your protection against forged email messages.

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Tags: dkim, DMARC, email filtering, forged, spam filtering, spf, webmail
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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8 Ways to Protect yourself from Forged/Fake Email

Monday, January 26th, 2015

The Internet is rife with fake and forged email.  Typically these are email messages that appear to be from a friend, relative, business acquaintance, or vendor that ask you to do something.  If you trust that the message is really from this person, you are much more likely to take whatever action is requested — often to your detriment.

These are forms of social engineering — the “bad guys” trying to establish a trusted context so that you will give them information or perform actions that you otherwise would not or should not do.

Here we address some of the actions you can take to protect yourself from these attacks as best as possible.  We’ll present these in the order of increasing complexity / technical difficulty.

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Tags: dkim, dns, email, fake, filtering, forged, html, phishing, read, social engineering, spam, spf
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy, LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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7 Common Misconceptions about DKIM in the Fight Against SPAM

Monday, August 18th, 2014

The popularity and prevalence of DKIM in the fight against SPAM is growing such that as of August, 2014, 47% of the most popular domains in the USA are DKIM-enabled (reference); globally, that number is 38%.  The trend is steadily upward and we expect DKIM use to be pervasive within a few more years.

DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail, is still a magic techno-jargon black box to most people. It’s “something” you gotta “add to DNS” to help stop SPAM or make your email “appear more legitimate”.  Beyond that (and even what DNS actually is) … many people are stumbling to know what is going on.

Here are 7 misconceptions about DKIM that we have seen, and the explanations that can steer you back on  track:

1. DKIM stops SPAM

Many folks believe that enabling DKIM for their domain and DKIM filtering for their inbound email will stop SPAM from reaching them.  Certainly using DKIM filtering on your inbound email will cut down on SPAM and using DKIM for messages sent by you can help others verify your email is legitimate; however, it does not actually stop spam.  In fact, it can make some SPAM look more legitimate.

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Tags: dkim, email, forged, phishing
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy
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