Security and Advisories

At Altamente we are tasked with managing a wide range of client communications and web infrastructure, which encompasses areas such as email, web, and messaging systems. With over two decades of experience in this field, we have a unique understanding of the cyclical nature of threats, attempted breaches, phishing efforts, and various forms of spam.

Observations suggest a significant effort is currently being deployed with the intention of undermining public trust in government, public health, and societal institutions. This report serves to highlight an instance of such attempts, demonstrating the recent trend of misinformation.

Recent misinformation campaigns have shown a concentrated focus on vaccination efforts, attempting to foster mistrust towards the medical community and governing bodies. The following illustration presents a portion of a spam comment aimed at promoting a common conspiracy theory related to the Covid-19 vaccines, namely, the myth of "vaccine shedding".

For a factual overview of "vaccine shedding", please refer to the related Wikipedia article. The concept of "virus shedding" is not a concern associated with modern vaccines, and these efforts aim to generate confusion by referring to outdated practices from the 1950s.

These concerted disinformation efforts, which involve significant time and resources, often raise questions about the motivations behind such campaigns. Why is there such commitment to disseminating spam and misinformation? This question brings us to the intersection of technology and human action.

The Interplay Between Technology and Human Activity

An in-depth analysis of these campaigns reveals that the individuals or organizations behind these attempts are not merely concerned citizens expressing their views. They are often employed to propagate this misinformation. A review of our server logs indicates that a substantial amount of the traffic to our hosted websites originates from regions such as China, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Given that the content we host holds little relevance for individuals in these regions, it becomes evident that the primary motive is exploitation of WordPress's popularity for disruptive and potentially harmful purposes.

This scenario necessitates the implementation of measures like captchas, designed to filter out automated spam posts. However, it's important to remember that human beings are sometimes paid to execute these tasks, illustrating that these campaigns are indeed orchestrated efforts.

To those who may find these posts credible, it's crucial to understand that these operators are not acting in your interest. They are manipulating public sentiment to achieve their own goals, often at the expense of national unity, faith in public institutions, and scientific discourse. The resultant divisions and societal disruption serve their objectives, often to the detriment of political and economic stability.

This article is from last year, but it still holds true. The holidays are crazy with infrastructure attacks. Read my synopsis from OG Consulting - http://www.og-consulting.com/2006/12/22/fighting-the-good-fight-against-spammers/

This year, I am noticing the spammers have gotten really smart. I see emails slipping through the filters, and I almost have to applaud them. "Way to go, bravo." They are simple, short, have maybe one link and have subtle and sometimes relevant subject lines. I got one the other day that had a Thanksgiving theme. Inside was a viagra, abilify or some sort of pharmaceutical spam.

From my perspective, we are protected from nearly all attack emails, exe attachments, links to trojans, malicious javascript, viruses, etc., but a few errant text only ads do slip through. I won't worry too much about them, but I still do my best to minimize these annoying pests.

On the server level, I've seen a marked increase in the past couple of weeks. I've taken precautions by:

• Making sure all software is upgraded and/or patched, and locked up tight (as usual)
• Flushed the spamassassan bayes database (which was so large it was dragging things down). You will notice that even though spamassassin expires records, bayes_seen never diminishes in size. This seemed to have an impact on mail scanning efficiency. I noticed that things were running slow, and once I reset bayes_seen, spamassassin ceased to bog down.
• Upgraded subscriptions to updates.spamassassin.org. These are the updated spam checking rules that are maintained on spamassassin.org. Howto is linked here
• Created a few custom rulesets to more closely match the profile of a typical Altamente client email.

As is usual, these times of fun and merriment for most people seems to have a inverse effect on us sysadmins. The spammers and hackers are out there, but don't worry, we are here keeping the barbarians at the gate, protecting you and your business so you can get your work done. We love that.