End to end encryption for emails

25-May-2015:
German government encourages encryption, by setting up easy to use and free service. Commendable move, I hope it is done properly, and does not leave any holes behind.

09-Aug-2014:
Yahoo follows suit, and announces the same for next year.

18-Jun-2014
Another commendable move from Gmail, even tho it comes at the cost of losing a bit business for them

European Central Bank Hacked; 20K Email Addresses Stolen

The hackers anonymously alerted the bank via e-mail, asking a ransom for the data.....  The ECB was quick to downplay the ramifications. "No internal systems or market sensitive data were compromised," it said in a statement. However, there is quite a lot that hackers can do with 20,000 emails, including spamming, phishing, brute-forcing the accounts and testing them as credentials for other, more sensitive sites like online banking.

Full Story

Data Leakage By Dumb Employees

How do you know, if your users have auto-forward feature enabled on their email systems? Risk here of course being that confidential data of the organization goes out automatically? How do you detect such offenders? It's harder than you would think it would be

Yahoo! Japan loses 22M User ID

The company lost user accounts, but no password related data. Weird?

Email Spoofing

So, I was looking for some good tools to spoof emails. To know what is "email spoofing", please refer to Wikipedia. I tried some popular websites, like:

http://emkei.cz/
http://www.sendanonymousemail.net/

Both most likely the emails sent from here gets tagged as spam. Recommended is using tools like (built into Bactrack) SET and SendEmail. Challenge of course is finding a good & reliable SMTP server. In the screenshot below, used Gmail's server:

Update: 25-Feb-13
A very good video tutorial to clone a website, and send out spam, using Backtrack's SET

Outlook vs Gmail

This is way under the belt..! Microsoft says Google reads all your email (to push ads).

I am not advocating Google, nor do I believe they have the best privacy policy. However, question for Microsoft, if you don't scan emails, how do you filter out spam?

Yahoo Mail rolls out HTTPS

Better late than never.Yahoo comes up with a full HTTPS session

10,000 Indian government and military emails hacked

Another case of a major govt embarrassment.

Yahoo! mail exploit on sale for $700

A YouTube video has been posted as POC.

Former CIA director's affair gets caught via his gmail account

Height of irony, the USA's CIA director was unable to protect his email communication. Well he did put in place a few measures, but apparently not good enough.

First, Patraeus set up a dummy account. And second, it's been reported that Petraeus and Broadwell never actually sent any emails to each other. Rather, the two relied on a strategy that has previously been used by terrorists in an effort to keep investigators off the scent.

Full story

Presidential Candidate Email Hacked

A hacker yesterday claimed to have broken into a personal email account linked to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney by answering "secret" password-reset questions.

Full Story

India overtakes U.S. as top email spam source

About 9.3% of worldwide spam traffic during the first three months of 2012 originated in India, Sophos says

Full Story

How To Read Email Headers

A simple but important topic. So, let's say this is for dummies and a reference for the rest of us!!!

Yahoo, Gmail asked to route mails via servers in India

More snooping by Govt of India.

Anonymous Leaks FBI's Cyberexpert's Emails

An excerpt below, the full story is here:

Anonymous hackers broke into two of Bacalagan's gmail accounts, his text message logs and his Google Voice voicemails, then dumped the whole thing on to a website andThe Pirate Bay. 

Is Someone Reading Your Emails?

Would you get to know, if somebody hacks or guesses your email account's password? What if the hacker logs on to your email account, reads your emails and then logs off without making any obvious changes? Is there any way to catch this type of an attack?

Here is a very interesting article that tells you not only a way to know if somebody has been snooping over your emails, but can also capture the intruder's IP Address.

Are you Sure your Email isn’t being Hacked?