Recent incidence of spoofing of agiledss.com

We noticed and have been advised that people are getting virus and spam emails claiming to be from agiledss.com.

On a technical level, the agiledss.com servers are closed to relaying. Spammers require OPEN relays in order to actually send mail from a server. A properly CLOSED TO RELAY email server is not vulnerable to being taken over by spammers.

agileDSS.com uses these mail servers as origin:

ntxbeus12.exchange.xchg
mout.perfora.net
gw2-sjl.salesforce.com
ccm06.constantcontact.com

So where is this spam that claims to be from agiledss.com actually coming from?

It is a well known ploy of spammers to do something called spoofing, where they make an email or virus 'appear' to come from an innocent party, often one you trust, in order to infect you.

The best known examples of this are emails from PayPal, eBay or Citibank telling you you need to check your account, but they actually link to someone looking to steal your passwords or trying to sell you products that you may not need.

So to be clear, getting an email claiming to be from agiledss.com doesn't mean it actually came from us. This is an industry wide rampant problem currently.

The spoofing entry on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spoofing

To verify the true origin of the email
The extended header in the email will list where it actually comes from. We use the servers mentioned above ONLY - if the email does not come from those servers, it is not an email from agileDSS. In Outlook, for example, you can right click on the email and select OPTIONS to see the header information.

Where did spammers/hackers get these emails to use in spoofing?
From our web site (although we take many precautions to prevent this, see below), from forum sigs, from YOUR email contact list if you've gotten a virus and have our emails on your system.

What is agileDSS doing about this?
We can't prevent people from lying and claiming to be us via spoofing with todays state of technology. What we can do is a programming technique to HIDE our emails from spammers (who use robotic spiders to harvest emails from web sites) and we have done so. If you look at our website, you will not find an email address that can be picked up as is (such as being able to simply click on it to get a new email message box appear with the address already in the TO field).

What can you do?
Do not show your email in your sig or profile or messages. If you must, then do something like this: greg AT agiledss.com. Most people can figure out to replace the AT with an @ and take out the spaces, however. Protect your system from spammers/hackers with up to date anti-virus software.

More details to come as we implement our programs. Thank you for your understanding and support and while we do everything we can to prevent the negative effects this can cause, if it happened to you, we sincerely apologize.

The Team at agileDSS