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Category — STARTTLS
Dozens of STARTTLS Related Flaws Found Affecting Popular Email Clients

Dozens of STARTTLS Related Flaws Found Affecting Popular Email Clients

Aug 16, 2021
Security researchers have disclosed as many as 40 different vulnerabilities associated with an opportunistic encryption mechanism in mail clients and servers that could open the door to targeted man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, permitting an intruder to forge mailbox content and steal credentials. The now-patched flaws, identified in various STARTTLS implementations, were  detailed  by a group of researchers Damian Poddebniak, Fabian Ising, Hanno Böck, and Sebastian Schinzel at the 30th USENIX Security Symposium. In an Internet-wide scan conducted during the study, 320,000 email servers were found vulnerable to what's called a command injection attack. Some of the popular clients affected by the bugs include Apple Mail, Gmail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Claws Mail, Mutt, Evolution, Exim, Mail.ru, Samsung Email, Yandex, and KMail. The attacks require that the malicious party can tamper connections established between an email client and the email server of a provider and has log...
What is SMTP STS? How It improves Email Security for StartTLS?

What is SMTP STS? How It improves Email Security for StartTLS?

Mar 24, 2016
Despite so many messaging apps, Email is still one of the widely used and popular ways to communicate in this digital age. But are your Emails secure? We are using email services for decades, but the underlying 1980s transport protocol used to send emails, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), is ancient and lacks the ability to secure your email communication entirely. However, to overcome this problem, SMTP STARTTLS was invented in 2002 as a way to upgrade an insecure connection to a secure connection using TLS. But, STARTTLS was susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks and encryption downgrades. But worry not. A new security feature is on its way!!! SMTP STS: An Effort to Make Email More Secure Top email providers, namely Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Comcast, LinkedIn, and 1&1 Mail & Media Development, have joined forces to develop a new email standard that makes sure the emails you send are going through an encrypted channel and cannot be sniffed. Dubbed SMT...
What Is Attack Surface Management?

What Is Attack Surface Management?

Feb 03, 2025Attack Surface Management
Attack surfaces are growing faster than security teams can keep up – to stay ahead, you need to know what's exposed and where attackers are most likely to strike. With cloud adoption dramatically increasing the ease of exposing new systems and services to the internet, prioritizing threats and managing your attack surface from an attacker's perspective has never been more important. In this guide, we look at why attack surfaces are growing and how to monitor and manage them properly with  tools like Intruder . Let's dive in. What is your attack surface? First, it's important to understand what we mean when we talk about an attack surface. An attack surface is the sum of your digital assets that are 'reachable' by an attacker – whether they are secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, in active use or not. You can also have both internal and external attack surfaces - imagine for example a malicious email attachment landing in a colleague's inbox, vs a new FTP server being...
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