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Thoughts on the Posterous hack

blog.dustincurtis.com

61–62 of 62 posts

Re: Thoughts on the Posterous hack

#61

Hey guys. I'm the cofounder of Posterous. Yes, someone did figure out how to post to Dustin's site today. This security hole is now fixed. We had a specific problem with the way we dealt with SPF records. Dustin didn't set any up, and there was a specific way that Robin Duckett's email server responded that caused us to flag it as a false negative for spoofing. For the vast majority of users who use gmail, hotmail or…

Great that you responded to the issue.

>We had a specific problem....

Most of the people here work in technology. Your response sounds a bit hand-wavy, as if you're alluding to some great complexity when the described "hack" is so incredibly rudimentary it would be the first thought of anyone making such a solution. The parts in this mechanism are trivial.

We've all done the "well...the packets they..uh...confluence of...ECC..."

>trying to stay a step ahead of hackers

Be wary of false confidence. I would wager that you've stayed a step ahead simply because you haven't gotten their attention yet. It's a classic "low security", non-scalable start-up approach. A "we'll deal with that once we're big enough that people notice it" approach.

>Over the past 2 years, we've developed robust spoof detection ip

Beyond using SPF and DomainKeys, I would be surprised if you have anything that could accurately get called "IP" in the realm of email. It's a long, long trodden ground.

Re: Thoughts on the Posterous hack

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. One of the top hits is for (what appears to be) Jamie Cullum's posterous. Can't tell if it's actually his or just a fan site. But your trick doesn't seem to work for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Cullum

Perhaps I'm mistaken then and should have spent more than 5 minutes on it. How I wish this iPhone had View Page Source.

You can install a bookmarklet to view source

http://fettig.net/weblog/2007/07/02/view-source-for-safari-o...

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