What is a Security Alert?
Did you hack my system?
Do you go looking for compromised systems to notify?
How did you discover our system has compromised?
Do you know who hacked my system?
Do you know how my system was compromised?
Can you provide more information about this?
Who did you tell about this?
Why are you doing this?
What now?
A: When we discover evidence that a system has been compromised we may privately notify the owners of that system about the problem and present the evidence that we have so that they can quickly address the problem.
A: NO! We made no attempt to scan or otherwise penetrate your systems without your permission.
Q: Do you go looking for compromised systems to notify?
A: No. As a natural course of our email security work we regularly detect security threats and build defenses against them. Essentially, compromised systems find us by attacking systems we protect.
Q: How did you discover our system has compromised?
A: As a normal course of our work we discovered that your system was being used in spam and malware or other attacks that we detected.
Q: Do you know who hacked my system?
A: No.
Q: Do you know how my system was compromised?
A: No.
Q: Can you provide more information about this?
A: Most likely no. In order to protect our customers and other parties involved we can only tell you about your system specifically. You should be able to use this information as a starting point for your own investigation. A good first step will be to check your system logs and take a close look at the network activity on your systems.
Q: Who did you tell about this?
A: We only notified you through contacts found on your public website. We will not tell anyone else.
A: We are trying to help! Our goal is to make you aware of the problem so that it can be resolved quickly.
A: Please take steps to correct the problem as quickly as possible! Contact IT security folks you trust.
Please let us know if we can assist you further.