Something a bit phishy in your inbox? You can now email suspected frauds straight to Blighty's web takedown cops The National Cyber Security Centre has launched the Suspicious Email Reporting Service: a new email address for reporting scam mails to a government department that might actually do something about it. The cybersecurity service, an offshoot of eavesdropping agency GCHQ, said it has set up an "automated programme" that will " …
So what teeth do they have, in terms of following up, identifying and shutting down?
Most of my spam seems American in target, essentially shilling health care, an Orwellian nightmare. Let me guess, the jurisdiction is limited to our shores...
(and then there is the question of efficacy)
>So what teeth do they have, in terms of following up, identifying and shutting down?
The UK national ninja-cyber secret security agency can employ a range of active counter-measures culminating in the ultimate deterrent of .... A stiffly worded letter
(the agency is not currently funded to permit overseas letters in the event of a foreign enemy)
I am really pleased about this. I am fairly convinced that the dodgy bloke across the road has been secretly taking Penguin biscuits on his walk's - which twice this week have lasted more than 60 minutes - once a whole 62 minutes. Plus I know he has been out and bought an illegally frivolous foodstuff, because I saw a suspiciously French lookin baguette poking out of gis shopping bag, and no one needs to risk our country by going over to France for foodstuffs, but since my CCTV isn't working since I wrapped it in tinfoil to keep the postman's germs from contaminating my wifi I was unable to prove this. Now I can shop him for dodgy emails - I knew that 'Hi - Just reaching out to the street to see if anyone needs help' had to be a scam.....
Most scam sites are served by CloudFlare's edge cache. When I've called them about phishing and robocall scams on their systems, they've told me to file a police report if I think there's a crime being committed. CloudFlare is in San Francisco where the police will not, by policy, respond to anything less than rape or murder.
The automated reporting system appears to be broken. I got a phishing email this morning to one of my email addresses purporting to be from Virgin Media saying my account was about to be disabled due to non payment and asking for me to verify my payment method. So I forwarded the email and it bounced due to containing spam. I tried sending the email as an attachment instead and it still got bounced. Finally I sent an email asking how exactly we are supposed to report phishing emails, which went through but then got an automated email thanking me for my report.
Reg commentards often make very intelligent comments about IT issues, so I am surprised by the silly ones here.
Obviously a service like this isn't going to achieve anything if the emails have to be handled by humans.
However, if there's a dataset of a million alleged phishing attacks, at the very least the domain names and IP addresses can be harvested and counted from the bodies and Received: headers of the emails to highlight the ones that ought to get some human attention. Equally, anyone trying to defame legit sites would be found out to.
Indeed, isn't such a system known as a **honeypot**?
It would be nice if the article had gone into more detail to say whether this is actually what is being done, or whatever other tricks they have up their sleeves.
"Received: headers"
Not sure what exactly you mean but there won't be any received headers on the phishing e-mail they received as there is no longer an easy way for most e-mail clients to "forward as an attachment" without specific instructions from the end user. The request also doesn't mention forwarding the e-mail as an attachment. Therefore headers will be lost and it will only be the body that remains.
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Report email scam has been a feature in Thunderbird for a long time and using it where the link is not already providing a 'deceptive site' block usually proves effective when checking follow up messages. That this is now implemented via google rather then the original Mozilla service is more of a concern and I trust GCHQ more than I do google! What SHOULD change is that international law enforcement actually deal with the people carrying out the fraud, rather than google simply 'giving them a slap on the wrist' ... so getting GCHQ involved in the process makes a LOT of sense to me, but has to be a coordinated international framework. And direct access to those fraudsters details where they are using 'money laundering services' like bitcoin should be a first step in bringing down internet fraud?
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