fail

News August 1, 2018

Twitter fails in an endless loop with their purge initiative

I am having troubles with Twitter… They have suspended my account @sorinmustaca and there is no way I can get it back. Also the @it_securitynews is being constantly blocked, but I can unblock it. Background: If you read the news, you may have heard that Twitter is closing millions and millions of accounts. According to this article in Washington Post, Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July. The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter confirmed to The Post, has more than doubled since October, when the company revealed under congressional pressure how Russia used fake accounts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, according to the data. What does this have to do with me and my suspended account? My account is used to publish the news from IT Security News – www.itsecuritynews.info and everything is done automatically. This seems to trigger some automatic mechanisms, which signal Twitter to block my accounts. However, there is a bug in their blocking page. If you try to login into a suspended account, you end up in…

Spam & Phishing November 14, 2015

Major PayPal failure: sending emails following all rules of a “good” phishing email

The email below (in German) is from PayPal. It is not a phishing email or a spam email pointing to some online pharmacy. I assure you of this. I have verified the DKIM and SPF information in the headers, checked all headers of any trace of alteration and of any trace of foreign IP address or domain. It is also very correct: it informs me that my credit card behind the PayPal account is about to expire. It asks me to update the credit card by clicking on the yellow button. At this point, I am without words. I would have never expected to receive something like this from PayPal. Their suggestions to detect phishing and to report phishing are here: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/security/suspicious-activity I quote: Suspicious emails Phishing and spoof emails aim to obtain your secure information, passwords, or account numbers. These emails use deceptive means to try and trick you, like forging the sender’s address. Often, they ask for the reader to reply, call a phone number, or click on a weblink to steal personal information. If you receive a suspicious email, FORWARD it to spoof@paypal.com. Our security experts can take a look to determine if it’s a fake. If…

Uncategorized January 29, 2014

When the Internet fails on you – IFTTT.com failure

My entire automatic posting on ITSecurityNews.info which is retweeted on @ITSecurityNews, @SorinMustaca and @sorinm_security is built on IFTTT.com. Well, this is why you didn’t get some tweets on time: Last night at approximately 10:00pm PST much of the work IFTTT does in the background stopped due to an issue with one of our backend services. Our monitoring systems would have alerted us to the problem immediately, but those unfortunately failed as well and we weren’t able to fix the issue until this morning at 10:00am PST. This is what I received from CEO of IFTTT, Linden Tibbets, a few moments ago. I see that now the posts are starting to come slowly, but I guess I missed a few hundred posts. Let’s see if they come back. Does anyone know any good tool to repost in WordPress complete articles from an RSS feed?