Featured Blogs

The Growing Threat of Cybersquatting in the Banking and Finance Sector

The apparent cyber heist of of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank's U.S. account may cause some people to question the security of online banking. While the online theft prompted SWIFT - a cooperative owned by 3,000 financial institutions around the world -- to make sure banks are following recommended security practices, the incident also could have ramifications for banking customers worldwide. more

Nitol and 3322.org Takedown by Microsoft

Reading this morning's blog from Microsoft about "Operation b70" left me wondering a lot of things. Most analysts within the botnet field are more than familiar with 3322.org - a free dynamic DNS provider based in China known to be unresponsive to abuse notifications and a popular home to domain names used extensively for malicious purposes - and its links to several botnets around the world. more

Bandwidth: Why Fast is Important in a Global Economy

Bandwidth is the basic foundation for Internet traffic as a connector to everything important in our lives. Whether it is basic bandwidth for connecting to family and friends, or a super fast highway for global reach and competitiveness in the business world, bandwidth constitutes the speed at which we connect as a global presence within the expanding sphere of Internet communication. ... To understand why bandwidth is important to all Americans, including personal and business uses, we must understand the different types Internet traffic. more

Namecoin Decentralized DNS Research

The holidays open up a block of time to catch up on "I meant to read that" bookmarks, RSS feeds, and all the favorited and forgotten tweets. I made it through 50 before a NormanShark blog post kicked off a research project. The analysts found a malware sample which was using .bit domains in their communications infrastructure, but .bit ... what is that? .bit is a TLD operating outside of ICANN. Some would say they are TLD squatting, but I leave that opinion up to the reader. more

Wireless Broadband vs Fixed Broadband - The Story Continues

This never-ending story is used by opportunistic telcos and their lobbyists to confuse the issue in order to gain regulatory or political advantage. The debate is now raging again in the USA. In an attempt to talk down their monopolistic position in the market the three telcos - and this time in particular, Comcast - are claiming that real competition does in fact exist in the American broadband market, citing competition from the mobile 4G LTE services as an example. more

CNN Spam Outbreak Quickly Morphing Into a New Breed

This past week we have been seeing some heavy CNN spam -- that is, spam in the form of breaking news stories from CNN.com... These all look like legitimate news stories, and indeed, they probably are taken straight from an actual CNN news bulletin (I don't subscribe so I wouldn't know). Indeed, the unsubscribe information and Terms of Use actually link to actual CNN unsubscribe pages. However, if you mouse-over all of the news links, they go to a spam web page wherein the payload is either a spam advertisement or you click on another link to download a file and flip your computer into a botnet. more

WSIS, Development, and Internet Governance: A Plea for ‘Star Trek’ over ‘Mad Max’

Humanity continues to find itself at a crossroads. Ahead of us lies an uncertain future filled with predictions of imminent doom and ominous prospects along with the wonders of science and technology. Behind us lies a century marked paradoxically by both devastating global conflicts and unparalleled global collaboration. As societies continue to globalize, we are increasingly becoming more connected - to the point where it is difficult, if not impossible, to divorce ourselves from the interconnectivity in contemporary systems of commerce, economics, politics, and culture. more

IP Address Intelligence Burdening Content Providers with Regional Laws?

I've been looking into IP address filtering by content providers. I understand that IP addresses can be attached with confidence to geographical locations (at the country level, at least) about 80% of the time. You have to make up the rest with heuristics. So there are companies that are in the business of packaging those geolocation heuristics for sites. ...How widely are these services used? ...does it now make sense to put content sites to the burden of complying with the laws applicable to the people/machines they know are visiting them? more

A Patent for SiteFinder-Like Resolution

I saw an interesting news item that broke Monday courtesy of DomainNameNews and SlashDot that hasn't been broadly covered yet. I'm surprised no one has posted on this yet on CircleID, so here goes. Apparently VeriSign has been awarded a patent for the resolution of mis-typed domain names. This was at the heart of the controversy back in 2003 around their SiteFinder Service. Amidst a storm of criticism ICANN insisted VeriSign shut down the service, and the company eventually agreed. more

First New TLD Quietly Enters Sunrise Period

The first Sunrise Period for trademark owners under ICANN's new gTLD program has begun. The gTLD is the Arabic IDN '????, or "dot-Shabaka". The term roughly means "web" in Arabic and eligibility for registrations is unrestricted. The Dot-Shabaka Registry has made it clear for months that they wanted to be the first TLD to launch this year. more

Searching for the Meaning of “Registers” in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA)

Where outcomes depend on a word’s meaning, the first task is to define it. “Registers” which is one of the keywords in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), is still in the process of definition. Its statutory context provides that a domain name registrant is liable to the owner of a mark if “it has a bad faith intent to profit from that mark … and (ii) registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name [corresponding to a mark] that … is distinctive at the time of registration of the domain name [and] is identical or confusingly similar to that mark. more

FCC and Comcast: Reasonably Vague

So, the FCC will recommend that Comcast be "punished" or receive "sanctions" for its peer-to-peer throttling practice. And the network neutrality debate goes on, as does its ambiguities and vagueness. Even if you hate Comcast and agree with the net neutrality argument and the FCC's decision, one thing Comcast is correct in saying is that "reasonable network management" specified by the FCC in network neutrality policy set in 2005 is vague. Actually, the term "network management" by itself is broad before you even try to interpret what is meant by "reasonable", and it is not exactly correct in its application here... more

How Much Could Businesses and Consumers Save if .com Price Cap Benefits Were Passed On to Consumers?

Recently, a blogger whose website features posts and ads from domain speculators wondered what the cost of registering a .com domain name would be if somebody else ran the .com registry. But this blog post asks the more relevant question: "How much could businesses and consumers save if the benefit of .com price caps were passed along to consumers?" Now is a good time to focus on this question, since Verisign and the US Department of Commerce just amended their Cooperative Agreement to allow limited, regulated .com price increases. more

ICANN Reaches Landmark Agreement With Country Domains

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) concluded its Montreal meeting with a landmark agreement that cements the relationship between ICANN and the worldwide community of country-code top-level domain registries. "Today's agreement represents both a historic achievement for the ICANN process, and a powerful vote of confidence in the newly reformed ICANN 2.0," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO.

Finalizing four years of dialogue and negotiation, the creation of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) heralds a new era of cooperative and productive relations among ICANN and the country-code domain registries. The structure and rules for ICANN's new ccNSO were endorsed by domain registry organizations and individual managers representing every region and populated continent. "Today's agreement is a testament to how ICANN is seen as a forum the international Top Level Domain administrators can come together and jointly address issues," said Twomey. more

Edge Computing, Fog Computing, IoT, and Securing Them All

The oft used term "the Internet of Things" (IoT) has expanded to encapsulate practically any device (or "thing") with some modicum of compute power that in turn can connect to another device that may or may not be connected to the Internet. ... The information security community -- in fact, the InfoSec industry at large -- has struggled and mostly failed to secure the "IoT". This does not bode well for the next evolutionary advancement of networked compute technology. more