See you at Inbox/Outbox this Week?

I'll be keynoting again and sitting on the Spamhaus panel. I'm also running an extra session about sender authentication (i.e., SPF and DKIM).

Everything's repeated both days, except the panel, which is only on Tuesday.

If you can't find me, text me on +447789200701 (assuming you want to ;-)

Weird Story in Computerworld

Greetings from Vegas.

My chums at Computerworld have put up a very oddly-written story today. It seems that Kingfisher Bay, an Australian resort, was using an "aging" version of Symantec's spam filter. Surprise-surprise, old versions of spam filters don't work very well, letting through a lot of spam.

In fact, it turns out that the resort wasn't using the Symantec Brightmail technology at all. It was still using the old, pre-Brightmail engine. Oddly, Symantec still sells this -- can't see why that's a good idea.

Anyway, it sounds to me like the company decided it wanted to use a managed service, rather than an in-house solution. Many smaller organizations are making this choice. Their obvious targets are MessageLabs, Postini, Microsoft (née FrontBridge), or a bunch of smaller/regional providers.

In the end, they chose MessageLabs. Naturally, MessageLabs is crowing to the press about how it's gained a customer from Symantec.

But hang on, doesn't MessageLabs use Symantec Brightmail anti-spam for its service? How ironic...

Greetings from Orlando

Greetings from Tech-Ed, where some enterprising soul pointed a cam at the keynote's opening skit.



Bob [Muglia], meet Bob!

See You at Microsoft's Tech-Ed or Symantec's Vision?

This week, I shaaall mostly be in Orlando, for Microsoft's Tech-Ed bash.

Next week: Vegas (baby) for Symantec's Vision.

Email or text me (+447789200701) for meetup coordinates.

Zulfikar Ramzan is Correct About Phishing

Zully is right on in his demolition of Mikko Hypponen's idea for a ".bank" TLD.

Writing on Symantec's Security Response weblog, he basically urinates all over Mikko's plan (although he's a lot more diplomatic than that). Some choice cuts:

Phishers don’t have to use the .bank extension and most users will fail to notice ... if you look at almost every phishing site these days, the URL itself is a blatant giveaway that you’re not at an authentic site
...
The proposal will also lull users into a false sense of security for a number of reasons ... The bad guys may still be able to get .bank domains ... won’t stop phishing attacks that exploit cross-site scripting vulnerabilities ... Browsers are sometimes susceptible to address-bar overlay vulnerabilities. [read more]

Or, to put it another way, the problem with this proposal is that roughly half the population have below-average intelligence (hat tip: APHC).

Sure, it's easy to be a critic, but such ideas just waste energy that could be ploughed into useful furrows, such as DKIM and domain-level reputation.

See also: BofA Sitekey, Yahoo! Signin Seal, etc., etc.