Did you know that an overwhelming majority of the email going around the interwebs each day is spam?<\/p>\n\n
You may ask yourself, \u201cWhy do people spam?\u201d The short answer is, it\u2019s lucrative.<\/p>\n\n
While most of us know to never click on messages that look spammy, there are still a handful of innocent users that fall victim; and unfortunately, that is all it takes to make it worthwhile for the spammer. \u00a0The number of spam messages that make it through to our mailboxes each day is severely outnumbered by the number of messages that get blocked at the gateway, however. This is because anti-spam solutions have advanced over the years and are continuously improved.<\/p>\n\n
For this reason, Mailgun and other email service providers have become targets for bad actors looking to exploit reputable email servers to get their messages delivered. We\u2019ve seen a lot of these attempted and sometimes successful exploits over the years and have learned valuable lessons from the tactics used. But what good is keeping this information to ourselves when it can be used to help others? We wanted to share what we\u2019ve seen in the hopes that others out there that provide similar services to customers can be better prepared and better protected should they too become targets.<\/p>\n\n
So, how exactly do bad actors attempt to exploit Mailgun accounts? There are quite a few ways, but for this post, we\u2019re going to focus on three. More often than not, the perpetrator\u2019s attempts come in the form of credential stuffing, targeted attacks with public information, and namespace traversal. We\u2019ll talk about each of these below along with what you can do to protect yourself and what we are doing to counteract the attacks.<\/p>\n\r\n