A couple of days ago I found a lot of bounced emails in my ‘Spam’ folder. On closer inspection, I was alarmed to discover they were all spam that appeared to have been sent from my domain. The return addresses all began with different nonsense usernames like ‘Three_Nasrabi’ before the @ sign, and then ended with my domain name. The contents were various kinds of junk mail.
My home computer has a firewall and virus shield that is updated daily, and my email hosts also check for viruses, so I didn’t think that was the cause of the problem.
My first concern was that someone might have sent them by hijacking scripts on my website. I had recently been working on improvements to overall security, but what if I had made a mistake? I checked my website statistics, and the scripts did not seem to have been accessed more than usual. I deactivated them just in case while I contacted my web hosts.
They replied very quickly, offering to check the headers of any of the spam emails to see where they were coming from. Luckily, some of them had very detailed header information. But unluckily, it showed that the problem was nothing I could fix.
Somebody, somewhere else, had found that my domain name was a valid name, and was inserting it into their email headers as the return address for sending spam. They need to use a genuine domain name to get past the spam filters used by email accounts that receive them. Sometimes they use programs that put words together at random to make possible names and test them. Otherwise they just get a list of genuine domain names in other ways, such as automatically spidering the internet, collecting marketing information lists, and so on.
This is a form of identity theft known as ‘email spoofing’ and there is apparently no way to prevent people from doing this. The best protection currently is to add an ‘SPF’ listing to your DNS TXT record.
Using SPF
SPF stands for ‘Sender Policy Framework’ (here’s its listing in Wikipedia). The SPF record allows you to specify which computers are allowed to send email from your domain name, so that email applications that check this can reject the spoofed email as spam before they even receive the body of the message.
SPF records look approximately like this:
example.org. IN TXT “v=spf1 a mx -all”
Wikipedia explains them quite well. There is more information (though very technical and confusing) at the SPF Project Overview home page and an online tool to help you set them up at: http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html?mydomain=example.com&submit=Go%21
The tool will provide you with the code to add to your DNS TXT record. For the exact formatting, you will need to know whether your hosting uses BIND, Windows DNS or tinydns (djbdns). You will also need to change the DNS TXT record yourself via your hosting control panel or if you can’t access this, ask your web hosts to do it. Be aware that DNS changes can take several hours to work their way through the system.
Having taken immediate steps to establish the cause and protect (as far as possible) against further spamming, I thought I should do the responsible but embarrassing thing and warn my customers. The next day one of them told me their computers had had a virus, so that could have caused a small amount of bounced emails to addresses taken from their address book (fingers crossed).
What else can you do if your email address is being forged by spammers?
It’s important to tell your web hosts, so that at least they know it isn’t you that’s sending the spam. In some cases, if web hosts receive complaints of junk mail spamming, they may deactivate your hosting. In my case, I asked my web hosts to confirm that they wouldn’t be suspending my hosting or email over this, as the spam was not coming from the account itself. They replied, ‘No, unless we get serious complaints regarding it, in which case we will speak to you first.’ – not 100% reassuring, but at least it would give me the chance to make alternative arrangements.
So the next thing to do to protect your hosting (not to mention your personal or business name and reputation!) is to prevent these complaints by publishing information and an apology for any irate spam recipients that come to your website looking for an explanation. I’ve discovered several companies that have done this, and following their examples, I have posted my own page here: ‘Email Spoofing – please read on’, with a link from the start of my home page text as the email spam is so recent.
Click here for lots of useful advice from
Risky Thinking: Advice on how to protect yourself from Email Identity Theft.
This white paper from Artic Soft covers more technical information on
security and various kinds of spoofing threats.
Useful security tools, downloads and information.
This article from Webtech explains email spoofing in clear and friendly terms.
In rare cases, email spoofing is part of a coordinated deliberate attack of personal revenge or competitive sabotage, known as a ‘Joe Job’ after the first company that was closed down in this way. Here is advice on preventing and coping with a Joe Job.
Having read more about this recently, it appears the problem can become massive. So far, (fingers crossed), there has been nothing here on this scale yet, so I’m hoping the legal actions mentioned may have put spammers off using any domain too intensively, and also that the measures taken may help avoid the worst and keep us out of legal action ourselves.
Click here for a list of Spam lawsuits or legal actions.
