Monthly Archives: January 2011

Another Gawker bug: handling non-ASCII characters in passwords

A few weeks ago I detailed how Gawker lost a million of their users’ passwords. Soon after this I found an interesting vulnerability in Gawker’s password deployment involving the handling of non-ASCII characters. Specifically, they didn’t handle them at all until two weeks ago, instead they were mapping all non-ASCII characters to the ASCII ‘?’ prior to hashing them. This not only greatly limited the theoretical space of passwords, but meant that passwords consisting of any n non-ASCII characters were equivalent to ‘?’^n. Native Telugu or Korean speakers with passwords like ‘రహస్య సంకేత పదం’ or ‘비밀번호’ were vulnerable to an attacker simply guessing a string of question marks. An attacker may in fact know in advance that some users are from non-Latin countries (for example by looking at their email addresses) potentially making this more easily exploitable.

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Everyone’s spam is unique

How much spam you get depends on three main things, how many spammers know (or guess) your email address, how good your spam filtering is, and of course, how active the spammers are.

A couple of years back I investigated how spam volumes varied depending on the first letter of your email address (comparing aardvark@example.com with zebra@example.com), with the variations almost certainly coming down to “guessability” (an email address of john@ is easier to guess than yvette@).

As to the impact of filtering, I investigated spam levels in the aftermath of the disabling of McColo — asking whether it was the easy-to-block spam that disappeared? The impact of that closure will have been different for different people, depending on the type (and relative effectiveness) of their spam filtering solution.

Just at the moment, as reported upon in some detail by Brian Krebs, we’re seeing a major reduction in activity. In particular, the closure of an affiliate system for pharmacy spam in September reduced global spam levels considerably, and since Christmas a number of major systems have practically disappeared.

I’ve had a look at spam data going back to January 2010 from my own email server, which handles email for a handful of domains, and that shows a different story!

It shows that spam was up in October … so the reduction didn’t affect how many of the spam emails came to me, just how many “me’s” there were worldwide. Levels have been below the yearly average for much of December, but I am seeing most (but not all of) the dropoff since Christmas Day.

Click on the graph for an bigger version… and yes, the vertical axis is correct, I really do get up to 60,000 spam emails a day, and of course none at all on the days when the server breaks altogether.