With the prevalence of spam circulating the globe in massive amounts, it becomes increasingly important for administrators to understand the potential causes of their IP address ending up on a blacklist. Spammers employ all kinds of tricks to try to send out as many spam messages as possible without revealing their identities. They do this through various techniques such as social engineering, employing malware, botnets, forging of message headers, and exploiting weaknesses in email systems or network infrastructures. For the spammer, it’s basically a numbers game. It costs next to nothing to send out thousands of spam messages, and if even a small handful of people click on a link or purchase a product advertised in a spam message, the spammer can profit.
If your email infrastructure is not properly secured, then you risk being infected with malware and becoming part of a spam botnet. Even if your server is not infected with malware, if your firewall and mail server security settings are not configured properly, your IP address could wind up on a blacklist. To protect yourself from being blacklisted, consider the following recommendations:
How often have you heard someone say “If you’re not doing anything illegal, then you have nothing to hide?” When asked this, I tend to respond with, “OK, then how about you give me the login credentials for all of your email accounts, including the ones you use for personal use?” I think of this as analogous to allowing a stranger to walk around in your house. Hey, it’s OK as long as you’ve got nothing to hide, right? The point is that, no matter what is contained in our electronic data, most of us want peace of mind in knowing that it isn’t being accessed by unauthorized individuals.
You may have heard the terms SSL and TLS, but do you know what they are and how they’re different?
Ever wonder why so much spam exists today? Though spam volumes have decreased from a high of over 90% of global email traffic, it still makes up roughly a third of that traffic, and though the numbers of junk email messages are decreasing, their malware and ransomware payloads are evolving and becoming much more dangerous. Some of the most common types of spam messages include financial scams, phishing attempts, ransomware, and botnet malware. In this article, we focus primarily on botnets.
Whether you work in health care, finance, government, or any other field that requires the storage of data, there's always someone out there who would love to gain access to your confidential records. Don't let the bad guys steal your data. Protect it with server-side encryption. Our latest release of MDaemon supports OpenPGP, which allows MDaemon to perform encryption, decryption, and key management tasks. Learn how to enable OpenPGP support in MDaemon, and how to send encrypted mail in our latest video.
