Featured Blogs

Not Quite Two Factor, or Is Your Phone Number Really Something You Have?

A recent article in the New York Times Dealbook column reported on phone number hijacking, in which a bad guy fraudulently takes over someone's mobile phone number and used it to reset credentials and drain the victim's account. It happens a lot, even to the chief technologist of the FTC. This reminds us that security is hard, and understanding two-factor authentication is harder than it seems. more

Raspberries! Botnet Spam Just Got a Whole Lot More Dangerous

Many have heard of botnets, but for those that aren't certain what they are: Botnets are armies of hacked zombie computers that have malware on them, and send spam email at the command of operators anywhere in the world. They can also be told to deploy denial of service attacks, by all hitting the homepage of a given company, or attacking the DNS server or a service or country. more

GAC New gTLD No Fly Zone

I have struggled over the past couple of weeks to come up with a metaphor to succinctly describe the standoff between the ICANN Board and the ICANN Government Advisory Committee (GAC) over the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) implementation process. So here's my best attempt to explain these dynamics in terms a layperson may be better to understand. I chose the metaphor for its timeliness, without meaning to offend anyone. more

Authorities Take Down the Mariposa Botnet

There are a number of sources talking about the takedown of the Mariposa botnet... Spanish authorities, working with researchers from Panda Labs, Defence Intelligence and a couple of other educational institutions, took down the Mariposa botnet (Mariposa is the Spanish word for "butterfly"). The Mariposa botnet is an absolutely enormous with around 12 million (!) nodes doing its bidding. It was involved in things like credit card phishing and identity fraud. more

Verisign Mitigates 300 Gbps DDoS Attack and Other Q2 2014 DDoS Trends

It has been another busy quarter for the team that works on our DDoS Protection Services here at Verisign. As detailed in the recent release of our Q2 2014 DDoS Trends Report, from April to June of this year, we not only saw a jump in frequency and size of attacks against our customers, we witnessed the largest DDoS attack we've ever observed and mitigated -- an attack over 300 Gbps against one of our Media and Entertainment customers. more

An Introduction to Security and Reliability - What Does It Really Mean?

I co-authored a book in 2005, titled "Extreme Exploits: Advanced Defenses Against Hardcore Hacks." My chapters focused on securing routing protocols such as BGP, and securing systems related to DMZs, firewalls, and network connectivity. As I look back over those chapters, I realize that the basic fundamentals of network security really haven't changed much even though technology has advanced at an incredible pace. "Defense in depth" was a hot catch phrase seven years ago, and it still applies today. more

The Spamhaus Whitelist

For several months I have been working with the Spamhaus project on a whitelist, which we announced to the public this week. While this is hardly the first mail whitelist, our goals are somewhat different from other whitelists. Think of e-mail as ranging from inky black to pearly white... more

ICANN Hugs China’s Multilateral Internet Governance Initiative

The original title of this article was "ICANN CEO Hugs China's Multilateral Internet Governance Initiative". CEO has been dropped from the final version. That deletion helps make one of its two essential points. Which is that since ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade accepted a formal advisory role with China's World Internet Conference (WIC, which is a proprietary project of the Chinese Communist Party) while still engaged in leading the U.S.-based technical coordinator of the DNS, and as that ICANN role almost surely played a decisive role in his being offered the position... more

DOTZON Study: Digital Company Brands 2021

DOTZON presents the fourth edition of the Digital Company Brands study. After having introduced the study in 2018, DOTZON continued to expand and enhance the underlying data to display how cities successfully use their Digital Company Brands. The Digital Company Brand is the digital dimension of a company brand and mirrors the "digitalness" of a company. Purely digital company brands developed for the first time in the 1990s, with the emergence of Internet business models. Some of them were based solely on a generic Internet address, for example, www.hotel.de or www.amazon.com. more

ICANN Hubris Knows No Ends

Despite all signs pointing to a launch of the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) program in Singapore, it seems like ICANN could not help poking the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) in the eye one last time. In the latest installment of how a California not for profit technical coordinating body knows best, we have the ICANN Evidence of "Use" Requirement for Trademark Protection document. more

IPv6 : Rumours Are More Accurate Than Predictions

As rumours tend to be more accurate than predictions, the last /8's are hanging already on this years Christmas tree and one should hurry to get hold of a small little RIR block to put on next year's tree. I will miss the decade of heated and passionate debates between Tony Hain and Geoff Huston on when the exhaustion would actually happen. Estimates ranged all the way from 2008 to 2020 with Tony predicting early demise of IPv4 addresses while Geoff initially thought exhaustion would come later. As time passed the interval converged and here we are. more

Video Continues to Drive Broadband Usage

Nielsen recently published some statistics about how we watch videos that show a continuing trend of migration from traditional video to watching video online. One of the most striking statistics is the total volume of online videos. December 2021 saw an aggregate of 183 billion minutes of online video viewing. And even that, the number is likely small since there are many uses of video on the web that are not likely counted in the total. more

Dublin.tel Grabbed by Lantec

During the sunrise period for .eu domains there was quite a bit of controversy, as a number of high profile names were grabbed by companies that had no legitimate right to them. One of the domains that caught my attention at the time was dublin.eu (see Irish Times article). So what about the .tel sunrise?
Were companies like Lantec, who grabbed the dublin.eu domain, actively seeking high profile names this time round? more

The World is in Need of Transformative Solutions

The world has changed significantly since 2000, when the countries of the world adopted the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While strong economic growth in the developing world has helped lift millions out of poverty, global population growth, modern lifestyles and consumption are now stretching the limits of the planet's resources. During this time, technological advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have radically transformed the way people communicate and lead their lives; now ICT can play a vital, transformative role in helping to put the world on a more sustainable path. more

When Having a Voice Isn’t Enough

In Brussels on Friday, an esteemed panel of experts got together to discuss the challenge of improving ICANN's accountability. It's just too bad nobody from ICANN came by to hear it. ... While their prescriptions varied widely, the panelists were remarkably similar in their diagnoses - namely, that ICANN has yet to meet the fundamental challenge of making its board and staff accountable and answerable to the community that it is intended to serve. more