email

April 6, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Spam Served With a Side of Dridex

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Kevin Brooks Overview The use of macro enabled word documents has exploded over the last year, a primary example payload being Dridex. Last week, Talos researchers identified another short lived spam campaign that was delivering a new variant of Dridex. This particular campaign lasted less than […]

January 29, 2015

SECURITY

Cisco Email Security Stays Ahead of Current Threats by Adding Stronger Snowshoe Spam Defense, AMP Enhancements, and More …

If you read the recently released Cisco Annual Security Report, you will have learned how spammers have adopted a “Snowshoe” strategy, using a large number of IP addresses with a low message volume per IP address, to send spam, preventing some spam systems from sinking the spam. This yielded a 250 percent increase in spam […]

April 9, 2014

INSIDE CISCO IT

Improving Email at Cisco Part 2 – The Employee Process Side

I’d mentioned earlier (see Improving Email at Cisco Part 1 – The IT Technology Side) that email has its ugly side: Too many Most of them are a waste of time Emails will, occasionally, carry virus payloads (or link you to sites that have worse); and yet I can’t live without it

December 13, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part V: Anti-Phishing in the Cloud

In the last chapter of our five part Big Data in Security series, expert Data Scientists Brennan Evans and Mahdi Namazifar join me to discuss their work on a cloud anti-phishing solution. Phishing is a well-known historical threat. Essentially, it’s social engineering via email and it continues to be effective and potent. What is TRAC currently doing […]

December 12, 2013

SECURITY

Big Data in Security – Part IV: Email Auto Rule Scoring on Hadoop

Following part three of our Big Data in Security series on graph analytics, I’m joined by expert data scientists Dazhuo Li and Jisheng Wang to talk about their work in developing an intelligent anti-spam solution using modern machine learning approaches on Hadoop. What is ARS and what problem is it trying to solve? Dazhuo: From a high-level view, Auto […]

August 15, 2013

SECURITY

The Highs and Lows of the Pump and Dump Scam

The Internet remains an environment where it is important to keep your wits. The recent indictment of nine individuals on stock fraud charges reminds us that the pump and dump scam continues to be perpetrated [1][2]. Stock spam emails were particularly prevalent during the mid-2000’s, with these messages reportedly comprising 15% of all spam in […]

June 27, 2013

SECURITY

Expiring Albert: Recycling User IDs and the Impact on Privacy

Within many organisations offering online services to the public, there must be a great temptation to expire redundant user accounts that occupy desirable user IDs but which are never used by their users. Presumably the user IDs have been registered by someone, used on a couple of occasions, and then forgotten about. Expiring and recycling […]

June 12, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

Email and Calendaring Social Community Decreases IT Support Caseload

In my previous blog post, I talked about how adding a social support layer enabled the IT Mobility team within Cisco to realize cost avoidance of $650k, which was leveraged for new, innovative projects. Benefits were also seen in Cisco IT’s Email and Calendaring WebEx Social community. Since it’s launch in Q4FY12, the Email and […]

June 5, 2013

DATA CENTER

Why I love working trade shows like Microsoft TechEd for Cisco

I have lost count of the number of trade shows I’ve worked over my career. But working trade shows for Cisco over the past 14 months has been a uniquely positive experience. Microsoft TechEd North America 2013 makes my 5th show evangelizing Cisco UCS and our solutions. I have been able to have long (sometimes […]