Featured Blogs

Satellites and Cellular Backhaul

Elon Musk recently announced that he was going to be providing cellular backhaul from the Starlink constellation of satellites. This makes a lot of sense from a financial perspective in that it avoids the costly wired fiber networks needed to reach rural cell sites. This is clearly a shot across the bow for companies that currently bring fiber connectivity to rural cell sites. more

A Cancerous Computer Fraud and Misuse Act

As I read through multiple postings covering the proposed Computer Fraud and Misuse Act, such as the ever-insightful writing of Rob Graham in his Obama's War on Hackers or the EFF's analysis, and the deluge of Facebook discussion threads where dozens of my security-minded friends shriek at the damage passing such an act would bring to our industry, I can't but help myself think that surely it's an early April Fools joke. more

Twitter, DDoS and the Motivations Behind the Attack

As we all know by now, last week, on Thursday, August 7, Twitter was hit with a denial-of-service attack that took it down for several hours. Other social networking sites like Facebook, LiveJournal, Youtube and Blogger were also hit. They managed to repel the attack although Facebook was not quite as successful as the other larger players. The theory floating about at the moment is that this was a politically oriented play designed to target one guy: a blogger. We are nearing the 1-year anniversary of a the Russian/Georgian 2008 war. There is a pro-Georgian blogger by the username of "Cyxymu" who had accounts on all of these services. more

Outlawing Botnets

The European Commission is apparently considering the promulgation and adoption of a directive that would, at least in part, criminalize botnets. As I understand it, the premise behind adopting such a directive is that since botnets are capable of inflicting "harm" on a large scale, we need to separately criminalize them. I decided to examine the need for and utility of such legislation in this post. more

Computer Transactions, Not People, Are Driving the Need for All-Fibre Networks

Ever since we first became involved in developing policies and strategies for countries relating to what are now known as national broadband networks, we have argued that those taking part in the strategic decision-making processes of designing these networks should look, not at what broadband can do now, but at what high-speed broadband can do to assist countries to create the best opportunities for future developments. more

The Next New Media: Typewriters and Handwritten Letters

Who would have thought that typewriters and handwritten letters would ever be back in fashion? But back in 2013 it was reported that Russia was buying large quantities of typewriters. When this was further investigated the country denied that this was for security reasons. Since the Snowden revelations there has been a further rush on typewriters, both by government officials and by a range of, mainly corporate, businesses. more

3 Processes That Ensure IoT Cybersecurity Compliance

IoT devices have ingrained themselves into almost every aspect of modern life. From home assistants to industrial machinery, it's hard to find a device that isn't connected to a network and gathering data. Despite widespread adoption, IoT cybersecurity compliance remains surprisingly low. A big reason for this is the unique challenges IoT devices pose to operators. more

Web Application Delivery: The Challenge of Managing Thousands of Web Applications in the Cloud

Cloud Computing is a hot topic. Some say it is already here, most agree that it will be much bigger in the coming years. It is pushed forward by the economic benefits of virtualization and consolidation. Take a heterogeneous data center, full of many kinds of servers, running a myriad of applications and consolidate it into a uniform farm of virtual machines, where each application is services by one or more VMs and you have a cloud, what is called a private cloud. more

The Other Side of Security

The Denver edition of Security BSides took place a few weeks ago in a garage turned art gallery on the far end of Denver's emerging Santa Fe Arts District, right on the border between historic working-class neighborhoods and a rambling wasteland of building supply warehouses. ... The presentation I enjoyed most was "Top 10 Ways IT is Enabling Cybercrime," presented by Daniel J. Molina from Kaspersky Labs. He described how quickly threats are evolving, how many new threats are appearing every day, and explained that the targets aren't always who you'd expect. more

CENTR Awards to Include Best Domain Name Registry as Chosen by Registrars

CENTR, the body which represent of European domain registries, will be holding its annual awards again this year. What's different for 2017 however is that they've added a new category: "Registry of the Year Award" ... And unlike with the other award categories, this one is open for voting to the registrar channel. The online voting or ranking is open now and is open to registrars who have a direct relationship with the registries. more

Email Getting a Makeover!

The New York Times recently posted an article about how email is getting a makeover and how the communication medium is being shunned by the younger crowd as they move more and more towards other platforms. If you like using email, that means you're an old fogey. When the Internet exploded in growth in 1995, email was a pretty cool commodity. Now, it's not that big a deal anymore, according to the New York Times. more

The Antivirus Uncertainty Principle

The antivirus industry has been trying to deal with false positive detection issues for a long, long time - and it's not going to be fixed anytime soon. To better understand why, the physicist in me draws an analogy with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - where, in its simplest distillation, the better you know where an atom is, the less likely you'll know it's momentum (and vice versa) - aka the "observer effect". more

Google Puts Its Foot Down

Google's announcement that it will "review" its business operations in China and is no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, is generating a range of reaction in China. Conversation over at the #googlecn hashtag on Twitter -- created shortly after the announcement -- has been raging fast and furious. more

From Telegraph (1914) to Twitter (2014) - Are There Lessons to Be Learned?

Could the Great War have been avoided if leaders had gotten together and negotiated in person instead of exchanging telegrams? In the voluminous historiography of the origins of WWI, there is a very little on the role of the telegraph. Today, as Twitter takes its place conference rooms, we can learn a lot from the failure of telegraph diplomacy one century ago... The telegraph introduced the notion of 'virtual presence'; for the first time in human history, communication was detached from transportation. more

Routing Security - Getting Better, But No Reason to Rest!

In January 2018, I looked back at 2017 to figure out how routing security looked globally and on a country level. Using the same metrics and methodology, I've recently taken a look at 2018 to see if we're making improvements. The good news is, it seems like the routing system is doing better! But there is still much work to be done. Using BGPStream.com, a great public service providing information about suspicious events in the routing system, I analyzed the number of incidents... more