Your gateway/perimeter anti-spam should be eating most of those types of messages. What solution are you using there?
-----Original Message----- From: John Hornbuckle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 10:03 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Tracking Down Spam Source Here's an update. Looking in the user's mailbox, I see that she received a phishing e-mail from "[email protected]." It's one of those messages that say that your e-mail account is about to be deactivated, and to please send your username and password in order to keep things working. I also see in her Sent Items folder that she replied to the message, graciously sending the requested information on Tuesday at around 10:00 AM Eastern. Around 6:00 PM Eastern, she started getting bounced messages by the boatload. Non-deliverable spam, sent under her name. So the good folks at discuz.org apparently made good use of the username and password she sent. Which brings up the question of, how do I combat this? User education is obvious--we've REPEATEDLY stressed to our users that they are not to send out their passwords via e-mail, and that we'll never request their passwords via e-mail. But beyond that, let's assume that users will be users and will occasionally do what they're told not to. What other layers of defense can we set up? -----Original Message----- From: John Hornbuckle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:54 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Tracking Down Spam Source This is a possibility--and I'm open to all possibilities--but it seems unlikely that this originated from inside our network. The user whose account this came from only accesses the network internally from one machine, and that machine has been turned off for days. One of my techs called her this morning, and she said she had been accessing her mail via OWA from an outside machine. She also said she got some weird message about her password, and had to reenter it (I know that's vague). So I'm trying to determine if it's possible that from the outside, her account was compromised and an external spam system was able to route mail through our servers by using her username and password... -----Original Message----- From: Oz Casey Dedeal [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:35 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Tracking Down Spam Source I would fire up sniffer (Wire Shark etc) or look at firewall logs to see who is generating the most traffic or eating up your bandwidth and start taking these clients off line, and deal with them. You might be dealing with workstation or kind has E-mail worm blasting it out? Also it is good to ask yourself why your server AV/ spam engine did not catch these and alerted you ( assuming you have decent AV/Spam protection as first defense of line and not letting postini do all the work for inbound and outbound SMTP traffic. ( If not you can ignore this part) Good luck Ocd On 6/16/10, Chris <[email protected]> wrote: > John, > > Do you have a firewall in place that you can log all smtp traffic? > There is a chance that the spam email *might* not be going through the > exchange server. > > Chris > > > On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 7:44 AM, John Hornbuckle < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> I’m ashamed to say that for the first time ever, spam has been >> generated from my network. All of our outbound mail is routed through >> Google / Postini, and they cut us off last night after detecting it. I’m >> mortified. >> >> >> >> What I’m needing help with is tracking down the source. I can see who >> the message claims to be from, and Postini tech support thinks her >> account really is the source (I assumed the “From:” address had been >> forged). But even if her account really is the source, I need to know >> what machine generated the traffic so that I can see what’s running on it. >> >> >> >> To be honest, I’m not sure how to do that. My weakness with Exchange >> is showing. I thought maybe the message tracking tool, which I’ve >> used to find some of the messages, but I can’t see the originating IP >> address in there. >> Some of the entries say “2002:96b0:25ac::96b0:25ac” for the ClientIP. >> I don’t know what that is. >> >> >> >> Any pointers? >> >> >> >> >> >> John Hornbuckle >> >> MIS Department >> >> Taylor County School District >> >> www.taylor.k12.fl.us >> >> >> >> >> >> NOTICE: Florida has a broad public records law. Most written >> communications to or from this entity are public records that will be >> disclosed to the public and the media upon request. E-mail >> communications may be subject to public disclosure. >> >> > -- Sent from my mobile device Oz Casey Dedeal Systems Engineer MVP (exchange) MCITP (EMA), MCITP (EA), MCITP (SA), MCSE 2003| M+| S+ | MCDST | Security+|Project+| Server+| http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog) http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog) http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog) [email protected] https://www.mcpvirtualbusinesscard.com/VBCServer/Odedeal/interactivecard NOTICE: Florida has a broad public records law. Most written communications to or from this entity are public records that will be disclosed to the public and the media upon request. E-mail communications may be subject to public disclosure. NOTICE: Florida has a broad public records law. Most written communications to or from this entity are public records that will be disclosed to the public and the media upon request. E-mail communications may be subject to public disclosure.
