Phishing – Iconix

It’s Baaack… Or Maybe It Never Left

Earlier this year there were stories based on IBM’s midyear X-Force Threat Report with headlines such as “Phishing Drops,” “Is Phishing Finally on the Decline?,” and “Phishing Dries Up as Users Get Smarter.” The sound bites left the impression that the problem was all but solved and that scammers had moved on to other methods. But this clearly isn’t the case, as noted by the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Phishing Threat Trends Report for the first half of 2009. They found that the number of consumer-reported phishing attacks in May (37,165) was 7% higher than last year’s peak, and that the [...]

iconixtruemark2017-01-07T17:35:30-05:00October 9th, 2009|Iconix Truemark Service, Phishing|

When Authentic Isn’t Real

Our Truemark service relies on email authentication (SPF/Sender ID or DomainKeys/DKIM) as a foundation for verifying legitimate messages. And there are some email services out there that indicate with an icon whether a message has passed authentication. But is email authentication by itself enough? Nope (you knew that was coming). Email authentication only tells me that the message really came from the entity who claimed to send it. That works great when someone pretending to be a bank uses the bank’s email address – the authentication will fail and the message can be dropped so consumers never see it. But what if [...]

iconixtruemark2009-09-25T15:51:10-04:00September 25th, 2009|Email Authentication, Iconix Truemark Service|

Visual ID for Email – Find What You Want at a Glance

There are two major value propositions for users of the Truemark service: find what you want and know that it’s real. Last week we announced our latest step in improving the user experience in email – use of favicons to visually identify messages in the inbox (see press release here). Prior to favicons we used either a company logo or a generic “check-lock” to highlight legitimate messages. In July we started displaying senders’ favicons in the inbox, which allows consumers to identify the sender of the message at a glance. It’s a compact way to distinguish messages in an easily [...]

iconixtruemark2017-01-07T17:35:31-05:00September 25th, 2009|Iconix Truemark Service|