5.7.1 Your access to submit messages to this e-mail system has been rejected. Talos Intelligence Cisco Bullshit

Look no further than this article. You’ve come to the right place. Yes, unlike other more well known reputable spam protection services (e.g. Spamhaus and Spamcop), Talos Intelligence has chosen their own shitty generic error message to confuse the rest of the Internet. And yes, Talos doesn’t share RBL DNS, so don’t even bother looking at places MX Toolbox.

Instead,  Talos Intelligence speciality is FALSE POSITIVES and their inability to detect BACKSCATTER, and other variants of reverse bounce undeliverable attacks. To put this simply:

[email protected] (in impersonated) address, sends an email pretending to be a user, that does not exist, on a valid domain. In fact, they take it a step further and emails are bounced back to any of the following three banks:

• Nedbank
• FNB
• Wesbank

If you’re a client of any of those banks, that’s why you’re reading this article. Your next step is to get to tell the IT department of your bank (yes, the IT department), about this bullshit, this article, and what a false positive is. How fucked up Cisco Talos Intelligence is and that they should get rid of it.

If you are from the bank, you know what to do.

Why are we so pissed off?

Well the first time, and having to reverse engineer their bullshit generic error message, I was quite happy to log into their website and see you can “log tickets” to dispute their “findings”.

https://talosintelligence.com/

However, it’s now around 30 tickets later, 3 months, and all I can say to you is they have a bunch of dumb fucks sitting at a keyboard that can only do this:

1. Press no
2. Press yes
3. Press automated reply

And guess what? You’ll only get to that “human” after you’ve passed the AI beauty contest. The human that can do three things above.

What is Security By Obscurity and Why Should Talos Give A Fuck

Security by obscurity is telling you to fuck off due to a security issue and thinking you’re so goddam important that you don’t have to explain yourself. Or furthermore thinking that explaining the technical issue to other technical engineers is going to give them some gun powder to further fuck you up.

It seems Cisco and Talos feel they are so high and mighty that they have chosen this path.

Good luck. My current advice is spam them till you’re blue in the face because apparently this works.