Loopholes in Services-I

After a long journey, I come to my favourite part of security analysis. Today onwards, I am going to cover security loopholes in various Internet services and protocols. Now one may ask, why do we have to go through this. Well, I beg to differ. One cannot learn how to defend oneself unless you are well-versed with your shortcomings. So here we are going to study, one-by-one, different Internet services which you use daily (some knowingly, some unknowingly) and then see the security risks involved in each of them. So let's start.

I start with the most simple and the most widely used Internet service, without which one cannot imagine the Net. E-mail. Electronic mail (E-mail) is a wonderful tool to have on the Internet, but it brings threats to your privacy and security. This section discusses some of these threats, such as e-mail bombing and spamming, as well as the risks of downloading certain attachments. One of the main weaknesses of e-mail messages is that not always it can be traced.

E-mail also includes people scanning your messages in search of valuable information, such as credit card, social security numbers or systems authentication information? When an e-mail message travels through the Internet it can be exposed to little programs that automatically will scan the mail feed into a computer, looking for specific information, just like you do in your mail program when you want to locate a particular message stored in one of your message folders.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Have you heart about e-mail bombing? This is a form of stalking, an anonymous type of harassment to which you can't reply back to the sender. E-mail bombing is illegal, but hard to track, because of the anonymous ways e-mail can be sent, usually consisting of sending large amount of messages, from hundreds to thousands of e-mail messages, to a single e-mail address, usually generating a denial-of-service on the mail server.
But don't confuse e-mail bombing with spamming. E-mail bombing is characterized by abusers repeatedly sending numerous copies of the same e-mail message to a particular address, whereas e-mail spamming is a variant of bombing; it refers to sending the same e-mail to hundreds or thousands of users (or to lists that expand to that many users). E-mail spamming can be made worse if recipients reply to the e-mail, causing all the original addressees to receive the reply. Spamming also may occur innocently, as a result of someone sending a message to a mailing list without realizing that the list explodes to thousands of users, or as a result of an incorrectly set-up responder message. If the identity of the account sending the message is altered, then e-mail bombing or spamming is being combined with "spoofing," which makes it almost impossible to track the author and the origin of the message.

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