[Discuss] Local ISP Recommendations?

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

Since I've been in security for the last few years, I've talked to a zillion people about a zillion things, and one IT guy told me he ran the company's mailserver, which apparently got hacked and used to distribute some sort of illegal material. He found out when the FBI showed up and confiscated the server. They determined it was probably not the company's fault, so they returned the server (without any hard drives, a couple months later). By that time, the company had already resumed email service on some external provider (users are bound to notice and complain about several weeks of outage).

I think if you run your own mail server, unless you do mailservers professionally (24/7, with IPS/IDS, and watch the RedHat security channels and patch critical vulnerabilities in < 1day, etc etc) you expose yourself to unnecessary spam, and risk of being hacked.

The risk of being hacked is *not* so much the risk of someone accessing your mail. It's the risk of someone doing illegal shit on your system, and you getting the blame for it. Try 10 years in prison, and being permanently registered as a sex offender, probably getting divorced, because someone thought that was *your* kiddie porn. You find yourself in the position of being presumed guilty, having to prove your innocence, because illegal material was indeed found in your system, or in your account.

P.S. The same risk applies to cloud services, if you don't use strong passwords and 2-Factor on dropbox/gmail/etc. Using a password manager is a very important part of keeping yourself safe online.