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Weird emails from clients? Tons of ?Undeliverable? messages? Server overload? Blacklists.
Your email domain was compromised and digging out of this hole is a long road indeed. But what impact does it have on the many levels of your organization? And more importantly, how do you fix it?! In this article, we detail a recent email breach and the recovery efforts taken to dig out of this relentless attack.
How does email get hacked?
While there are sophisticated, targeted attacks in the wild- Email is typically compromised from networks and systems that are unpatched, not protected properly, and have weak password policies. Even if you have an 8 character password, that contains a capital letter and special character- it would take just minutes for a brute force attack to crack your password? on a 2007 computer? running at 50% processor load. Today, just seconds. While password policies can be Ridiculously annoying, simply put, you?re just not doing good enough at it and it is costing you.
The value for hacked emails accounts can certainly be notable for hackers. What they look for essentially are emails that relate to financial transactions, such as messages from solicitors on conveyancing or mails relating to financial investments. They then impersonate the legitimate owner of the email account with the ultimate aim of stealing money and typically will set up a bank account in the victim?s name and attempt to divert funds to this account.
In our first day, our client was listed on just one blacklist. By day two, they were located on 4 blacklists!
How do you know your email has been hacked?
Like a medical mystery- It could be any, none or a combination of symptoms!
It?s typically obvious when email servers go south, but there are steps you can take to recover from an email hack.
Help me! What do I do when my email has been hacked?!
Good news!!! There are people in the world that not just remediate email hacks, but they can keep them from happening again! This is especially important because ending up on a SPAM blacklist comes with consequences. Even when you take the proper steps to delist your domain, there are still minimum wait times. These minimums increase if you get blacklisted again! So let’s get this right the first time!
As GI Joe taught us- ?Knowing is half the battle?. In our real-world scenario, despite the signs of compromise, the domain was never listed on a blacklist. But in the following days, more and more undeliverable messages were returned, and more and more dollars were lost in the name of productivity. CEO, VP, Office admin, Sales, you name it. Every employee is affected by an email hack- the cost in productivity loss alone is measured in the thousands for even a small office! We eventually discovered the office IP address on 4 different blacklists, as well as an email connector issue that took the Office 365 engineers at App River to resolve.
While some blacklists allow you to delist yourself, most require manual removal. But before you make a request for delisting, make sure you follow these Very important steps!
Besides just asking, most blacklists want to know that this problem won’t repeat itself. So you?ll need to change how you?re managing your IT completely.
All of these steps are not just prudent, but absolutely mandatory. Because if your domain or IP get removed- then added back to a blacklist- the minimum wait time increases exponentially!
What now?
There is typically a grim realization after an attack that, despite caring deeply about your technology wellbeing, your office simply doesn?t have to expertise or resources to properly secure your business from malicious attacks. In a world where DENTIST OFFICES are hiring CIOs, should we really expect our office administrators to completely secure our digital world?
Now, it?s not our advice for every small business to solicit a job opening for a CIO or even an IT tech or engineer. But it IS our advice to consider the benefits of a Managed Services Provider (MSP) and how their robust teams can secure your IT space from the bad guys of the world.
The bottom line? You should be focusing on making money for your business, not fixing IT issues. Click here to let us know how we can help.
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