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Edward Snowden on the defensive?
I was reading in the New York Times the other day an article entitled Snowden Defends Query to Putin on Surveillance. The article references a question-and-answer session with Russian President...
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I got locked out of my house this past week. This reminds me a bit of the NSA.
This post probably contains more information than you wanted to know.My wife last week was out of town, and during the week we had our windows replaced from single-pane to double-pane. Single-pane...
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Salt-and-Silver
I had a magic performance a couple of weeks ago and I decided to develop a new routine. I have never before performed this trick before. I like it because it is very heavy in sleight-of-hand and...
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Microsoft.com now publishes an SPF Hard Fail in its SPF record
This past Monday evening, Microsoft corporation for the domain microsoft.com changed its SPF record from soft fail to hard fail.There are many ways that receivers can use SPF hard fail – some mark it...
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I have been fighting spam for 10 years
A week and a half ago, I “celebrated” my 10th year fighting spam. I originally joined Frontbridge in July 2004, and 10 years later I am still with Frontbridge after it was acquired by Microsoft. Since...
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We have a mural painted on our wall
If you haven’t noticed the various posts on my Facebook feed, we now have a mural on our wall next to the dining room. It’s a picture of the Charles St Bridge in Prague in the Czech Republic.I really...
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Different Levels of Bulk Mail filtering in Office 365
In the Office 365 service, we have made a change to the way the service detects bulk email. In the past, we lumped all Bulk email together. For example, suppose you had four messages with the following...
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Does psychology explain why people are upset about NSA spying?
8 months ago, I wrote a blog post about how I am more concerned about being hacked by malicious spammers than I am about being spied upon by the NSA. In the year since Snowden, my views haven’t changed...
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Submitting spam back to Office 365
Office 365 (Exchange Online Protection) regularly asks customers to submit spam samples back so that we can improve the service. This information is also available here:Submitting spam and non-spam...
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Why does spam and phishing get through Office 365? And what can be done about...
IntroductionAs a filtering service, Office 365 (Exchange Online Protection, or EOP) is dedicated to providing the best antispam filtering possible, and we take this task seriously:We are working hard...
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Former NSA Director Keith Alexander speaks at MIRcon 2014
Last week, I attend MIRcon, Mandiant’s conference on Advanced Persistent Threats. One of the keynote addresses was given by Keith Alexander, the former head of the NSA. I enjoyed his talk, it was a...
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Support for anonymous inbound email over IPv6 in Office 365
Office 365 now supports anonymous inbound email over IPv6. In this case, “anonymous” means:The sending IPv6 address originates outside the service and is not in any customer’s settings (that is, not in...
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How to create Allow rules in Office 365 for senders over IPv6 (and also for...
Office 365 now permits anonymous inbound email over IPv6. Most of the functionality works the same in IPv4 as IPv6. However, there are some differences for inbound messages where customers want to...
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An interview with William Binney, former NSA analyst and whistleblower
A few days ago, I posted my notes on Keith Alexander’s talk at MIRcon about the NSA. Today, here’s a blog post about the opposite point of view.Yesterday, I came across an interview with William...
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Slideshow: A brief introduction to DMARC
Below is a slideshow of a presentation about DMARC I did at this year’s Virus Bulletin conference in Seattle.It’s not that technical although I do use a few technical terms. However, even newcomers to...
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Slideshow: A brief overview of how email over IPv6 works in Office 365
The following is a brief overview of how email over IPv6 works in Office 365, and why we are doing some of the things we are doing. Other services that also support email over IPv6 work similarly....
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Why do I have to give up my email address in order to get discounts?
This weekend, I went shopping at random stores around the city where I live. For you see, my wife purchased a book of coupons and we decided to use some of them. We flipped through the book looking for...
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Improving Backscatter detection with Boomerang
One of the features we have been working on in Office 365/Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is called Boomerang which is a mechanism to better detect backscatter spam.Image taken from here.What is...
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Gaining experience with encryption and key rotation
This year I’ve had the privilege of expanding some of my skill set in a field which I find fascinating, but also which I find I am woefully under-qualified to work in: Encryption.I like encryption....
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I am now helping out a little bit with Hotmail and outlook.com
One of the projects I will be working on going forward is helping out with some of the filtering with outlook.com.In case you haven’t heard, over the past few months Microsoft has merged together the...
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