3 ms·

You aren’t, also of email clients show the actual from address then it would stop most of these.

nobody9999 6y ago
Digital signatures definitely could have helped. However, the email addresses/domains were very carefully chosen, as was the text of the emails. It's pretty clear that whoever is involved either knows most of these people or had extended access to their emails. You should read the article.
g_p 6y ago
As tech savvy users, showing actual from addresses would be a big step forward from the modern trend (thanks, Apple?) of showing only the display name of the sender. Sadly recent versions of thunderbird seem to default to this as well, but an extension fixes that. The problem for most users is that they won't recognise people's email addresses as signal - it's just noise to them. They don't know how to parse a domain backwards from TLD/ccTLD to determine where it goes, and even if they did, homographs and other international characters can fool them fairly easily. Maybe the solution is something like SSH with trust on first use? Where users get alerted to a new display name and are asked to approve it the first time they send an email. Then a bundle of sender email, DKIM/DMARC/SPF success is stored locally, and future emails need to match that, otherwise the user will be warned this might not be the right user. It seems without cryptographic identities (vouched for through PKI, a la S/MIME) that this is a hard problem to solve when you take into account the human factors and how much the existing solutions rely on the user.
- hansvm 6y ago
  In a lot of contexts I wouldn't mind an explicit whitelist. If somebody wants my email, they can let me know ahead of time how they'll be using it, and I can grant them permission to send me emails from a given source. Combined with DKIM et al it would eliminate many classes of phishing attacks and also deal with the email harvesting and spam problem.
  - g_p 6y ago
    I can definitely see this working for tech-savvy users on additional accounts. The problem with email is that it's still used/needed as the "universal" online way to establish/initiate correspondence with someone. It's become used for person-to-person communications, as well as computer-to-person communications, and is probably one of the few standard, interoperable, near-ubiquitous means of reaching people, short of postal mail and carrier-provided services like SMS and voice calling. While requiring people to know who they want to correspond with before the fact could be helpful, it also breaks a lot of popular use-cases for email - email is often written into contracts as a valid means of serving notice etc pursuant to the contract. Locking email down to only receive mail from approved senders would break a lot of things, but certainly help to prevent this kind of spam. I wonder to what extent this could be reduced however by using unique per-use aliases - in a sense you can get a softer version of this whitelist by giving out per-sender inbox aliases, and therefore seeing which alias was used to send a message. Not quite sender authentication, but perhaps better than nothing. Doesn't prevent compromise of the underlying (human-to-human) email address, but would certainly help with a lot of phishing-type scenarios using breached customer records.
    - hansvm 6y ago
      Yep, it wouldn't suffice for every use case. It would however have completely satisfied every use I've had for email so far (supposing the other parties would have been willing to furnish their addresses). Combined with your unique alias idea, you could have one or more whitelist-only aliases guaranteed to not have some kinds of spam and phishing alongside other aliases for other purposes.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Could you implement this whitelist on your side by simply having two inboxes? E-mails from addresses in your whitelist go to "Messages from known people", other e-mails go to "Messages from unknown people". This wouldn't require any special action from other people. You would automatically be a bit more suspicious when looking into the "unknown people" inbox, and if you verify the author, you add their name into whitelist and automatically move all their e-mailt to the "known people" inbox. You could also set it up this way for your less tech-savvy relatives, and ask them to call you immediately if they find something in the "unknown people" inbox.

Digital signatures definitely could have helped. However, the email addresses/domains were very carefully chosen, as was the text of the emails. It's pretty clear that whoever is involved either knows most of these people or had extended access to their emails. You should read the article.

g_p 6y ago

As tech savvy users, showing actual from addresses would be a big step forward from the modern trend (thanks, Apple?) of showing only the display name of the sender. Sadly recent versions of thunderbird seem to default to this as well, but an extension fixes that. The problem for most users is that they won't recognise people's email addresses as signal - it's just noise to them. They don't know how to parse a domain backwards from TLD/ccTLD to determine where it goes, and even if they did, homographs and other international characters can fool them fairly easily. Maybe the solution is something like SSH with trust on first use? Where users get alerted to a new display name and are asked to approve it the first time they send an email. Then a bundle of sender email, DKIM/DMARC/SPF success is stored locally, and future emails need to match that, otherwise the user will be warned this might not be the right user. It seems without cryptographic identities (vouched for through PKI, a la S/MIME) that this is a hard problem to solve when you take into account the human factors and how much the existing solutions rely on the user.

hansvm 6y ago
In a lot of contexts I wouldn't mind an explicit whitelist. If somebody wants my email, they can let me know ahead of time how they'll be using it, and I can grant them permission to send me emails from a given source. Combined with DKIM et al it would eliminate many classes of phishing attacks and also deal with the email harvesting and spam problem.
- g_p 6y ago
  I can definitely see this working for tech-savvy users on additional accounts. The problem with email is that it's still used/needed as the "universal" online way to establish/initiate correspondence with someone. It's become used for person-to-person communications, as well as computer-to-person communications, and is probably one of the few standard, interoperable, near-ubiquitous means of reaching people, short of postal mail and carrier-provided services like SMS and voice calling. While requiring people to know who they want to correspond with before the fact could be helpful, it also breaks a lot of popular use-cases for email - email is often written into contracts as a valid means of serving notice etc pursuant to the contract. Locking email down to only receive mail from approved senders would break a lot of things, but certainly help to prevent this kind of spam. I wonder to what extent this could be reduced however by using unique per-use aliases - in a sense you can get a softer version of this whitelist by giving out per-sender inbox aliases, and therefore seeing which alias was used to send a message. Not quite sender authentication, but perhaps better than nothing. Doesn't prevent compromise of the underlying (human-to-human) email address, but would certainly help with a lot of phishing-type scenarios using breached customer records.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Yep, it wouldn't suffice for every use case. It would however have completely satisfied every use I've had for email so far (supposing the other parties would have been willing to furnish their addresses). Combined with your unique alias idea, you could have one or more whitelist-only aliases guaranteed to not have some kinds of spam and phishing alongside other aliases for other purposes.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Could you implement this whitelist on your side by simply having two inboxes? E-mails from addresses in your whitelist go to "Messages from known people", other e-mails go to "Messages from unknown people". This wouldn't require any special action from other people. You would automatically be a bit more suspicious when looking into the "unknown people" inbox, and if you verify the author, you add their name into whitelist and automatically move all their e-mailt to the "known people" inbox. You could also set it up this way for your less tech-savvy relatives, and ask them to call you immediately if they find something in the "unknown people" inbox.