COVID Domain Registrations Surged in March

The Internet and the domain name system (DNS) have become the mainstay of the new COVID sheltered world. Afilias looked at registrations in the unrestricted domain name space, with a special focus on the popular .INFO, .PRO, .MOBI and .IO domain name extensions. The data shows that the number of website and domain registrations related to COVID and Coronavirus in these extensions is flattening after a surge in March. more

Remote Work Demands Encryption

Now that we are all working from home (WFH), the need for encryption must also increase in priority and awareness. Zoom's popular video conferencing solution got in hot water because they promised "end-to-end" encryption but didn't deliver on it - prompting some organizations to ban it from use altogether. Encryption protects confidential information from being exposed in transmission, providing a secure way for the intended recipient to get the information without snooping by others. more

New Cyberthreats: Have You Been Exposed at Home?

There are new threats that you may have already been exposed to. Here are some of the new threats and advice on how to protect yourself. During this pandemic, Zoom has emerged as a very popular teleconferencing choice for companies and educational institutions, but a new weakness for Zoom was also discovered. Some online conferences and classes that had not password protected their sessions fell victim to eavesdroppers using the screen sharing feature to "Zoom Bomb" those sessions with graphic images. more

Say YES to DNSSEC

With the latest "DNSpionage" attack, ICANN astutely prompted domain name holders to fully deploy DNSSEC on their names. Afilias absolutely supports this and encourages the same. In this post, I remind you of why DNSSEC is important and our continued role. Afilias has a long history in the development and advocacy of DNSSEC. In 2007, we partnered with Public Interest Registry to help found dnssec-deployment.org. more

Building a Secure Global Network

Recently, the DNS has come under an extensive attack. The so-called "DNSpionage" campaigns have brought to light the myriad methods used to infiltrate networks. These attacks employed phishing, system hopping via key exfiltration, and software zero day exploits, illustrating that many secure networks may not be fully protected. more

Equifax Breach: 9 Fraud Prevention Steps Everyone Should Take

The U.S. Internet Revenue Service now says that criminals already had most of the information that credit bureau Equifax lost in a breach that revealed personal information about nearly 150 million people. The incident at Equifax and the IRS' mid-October admission of how much-stolen data was already in criminal hands may force changes in how the world handles personal information. more

Maintaining Security and Stability in the Internet Ecosystem

DDoS attacks, phishing scams and malware. We battle these dark forces every day - and every day they get more sophisticated. But what worries me isn't just keeping up with them, it is keeping up with the sheer volume of devices and data that these forces can enlist in an attack. That's why we as an industry need to come together and share best practices - at the ICANN community, at the IETF and elsewhere - so collectively we are ready for the future. more

Developing Internet of Things Building Blocks

The Internet is undergoing an evolutionary transformation resulting from the explosive growth of things that are interconnected. From single purpose sensors through wearable technologies to sophisticated computing devices, we are creating, exchanging, and consuming more data at rates that would have been inconceivable just a decade ago. The market suggests the average consumer believes this is the best world possible. As technologists, we have a responsibility to consider if we are building an Internet that is in the best interest of the user. more

Help CrypTech (and Me) Make the Internet More Secure

Are you ready to help me make the Internet more secure? Here's your chance to join me in a project to create an open-source hardware device to protect email, files and other data from hackers and government spies. The CrypTech Project was founded in late 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US and other governments were exploiting weak cryptography and loose standards to gain access to citizens' email, documents, and other files. more

The Internet of Things: When Sci-Fi Becomes Reality

In my last blog post I shared some of the general security challenges that come with the Internet of Things (IoT). In this post, I will focus on one particular security risk: distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Even before the age of IoT, DDoS attacks have been turning multitudes of computers into botnets, attacking a single target and causing denial of services for the target's users. By "multitudes" we can be talking about thousands or even millions of victim devices. Now add IoT into the equation... more

The Internet of Things: Solving Security Challenges from the Fringe to the Core

News flash: to help fight California's drought, Samsung is offering a $100,000 prize to the innovator who creates "the most effective use of IoT and ARTIK [Samsung's IoT platform] technology for reducing water consumption by individuals or municipalities." When the average reader of this news headline needs no explanation of what "IoT" means or what this contest is about, we know IoT, or the Internet of Things, is for real. There are already an estimated 25 billion connected devices around the world, according to expert estimates. more

Which Domains Stand the Strongest Against Phishing Attacks?

The latest Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) Global Phishing Survey, which analyzed over 100,000 phishing attacks in the first half of 2014, examines the progress that top level domains (TLDs) are making in responding to phishing attacks that use their TLDs. The report finds the .INFO domain has the lowest average phishing uptimes as compared to other TLDs, such as .COM and .NET. more

.???? Brings the Promise of a New Digital India

On August 27, 2014, the world became a bit more connected as the Internet welcomed more than 400 million Hindi language speakers in their own language. .???? (.Bharat), which means India in the Hindi language, was inaugurated on August 27 in New Delhi by Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, India's Minister of Law & Justice and Communications & Information Technology. more

More Problems Crop Up With Universal Acceptance of Top Level Domains

I've often found truth in the famous George Santayana quote, "Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That's an apt warning for what is currently happening - again - with the hundreds of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) that are launching ... and failing to work as expected on the Internet. First, a quick refresher: As most CircleID readers know, in the early 2000s, seven new gTLDs were launched: .AERO, .BIZ, .COOP, .INFO, .MUSEUM, .NAME and .PRO. Aside from Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs), these were the first top-level changes to the DNS since the early days of the Internet. more

2012 Global Phishing Trends: Uptime Down, Numbers Up

Despite security advances over the past year, including the increased deployment of DNSSEC, pirates continue to wreak havoc on the Internet. But before you decide that Internet security innovations are futile, consider this: online criminals are just like burglars in the physical world; they don't take new ways of blocking their best efforts lying down. They come up with new and, in some cases, stronger plans of attack. more

Mobile Users Now and in the Future: A Snapshot

Like many of us in the technology industry, I am captivated by the growing adoption of mobile. It's changing multiple industries at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. And my own interest accelerated when Afilias acquired another Irish company named dotMobi. ...since a mobile domain is not useful without mobile sites, dotMobi developed a site-building tool called goMobi that is used globally by hundreds of thousands of site owners. Because of that, we have unique information about who is using the mobile Web, and how they're using it. more

Slowly Cracking the DNSSEC Code at ICANN 43

As regular readers know, ICANN holds lengthy, in-depth discussions devoted to DNSSEC at each of its three annual meetings. The half-day session held at ICANN 43 in Costa Rica last month was particularly interesting. What became clear is that the industry is quickly moving into the end-user adoption phase of global DNSSEC deployment. more

NASA Teething Troubles Teach a DNSSEC Lesson

On January 18, 2012, Comcast customers found they could not access the NASA.gov website. Some users assumed that Comcast was deliberately blocking the website or that NASA, like Wikipedia and Reddit, was participating in the "blackout" protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) going on that day. As it turned out, the truth was much less exciting, but it offers important lessons about DNSSEC. more

DNSSEC Update from ICANN 42 in Dakar

While the global rollout of DNSSEC continues at the domain name registry level - with more than 25% of top-level domains now signed - the industry continues to focus on the problem of registrar, ISP and ultimately end-user adoption. At the ICANN meeting in Dakar in late October, engineers from some of the early-adopting registries gathered for their regular face-to-face discussion about how to break the "chicken or egg" problems of secure domain name deployment. more

DNSSEC Baby Steps Reported at ICANN 41

The Internet is slowly beginning to adopt the new DNSSEC domain names standard, but significant challenges remain. That was the main takeaway from a four-hour workshop on the technology held during the recent ICANN 41 public meeting in Singapore, which heard from many domain registries, registrars and other infrastructure providers. more

Beyond the Top Level: DNSSEC Deployment at ICANN 40

I recently wrote about the encouraging level of DNSSEC adoption among top-level domain name registries, and noted that adoption at the second level and in applications is an important next step for adding more security to the DNS. The root and approximately 20 percent of the top level domains are now signed; it is time for registrars and recursive DNS servers operated by the ISPs to occupy center stage. more

DNSSEC Deployment Reaching Critical Mass

Less than nine months after the DNS root was signed, the rollout of DNSSEC across the Internet's top-level domains is approaching the tipping point. Thanks to the combined efforts of registries around the world, the new security protocol will soon be available to the majority of domain name registrants in almost a quarter of all TLDs. more

Industry Makes Rapid Progress on DNSSEC

DNSSEC is being rolled out quickly in top-level domain registries around the world, but there's still some way to go to encourage other Internet stakeholders to adopt the new security technology. That was one of the key takeaways from a day-long, comprehensive session on Domain Name System Security Extensions implementation worldwide, held during ICANN's public meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, last week. more

Will US Government Directives Spur IPv6 Adoption?

Yesterday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. government hosted a workshop discussing the state of IPv6 in the United States and its impact on industry, government, and the Internet economy. I was asked to be a panelist, along with industry executives from ARIN, ISOC, ICANN, Comcast, Akamai, Verizon, Google, VeriSign, DOE, NIST, and DREN. Moderated by Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States, this was the first event in the past few years to truly shine a spotlight on IPv6 adoption (or lack thereof) and introduce key directives to move this issue forward. more

Three Things Registrars Must Do to Enhance Security

If the rise of phishing has taught us anything, it's that on the Internet, if a digital asset has value, there's somebody out there who wants to steal it. Whether it's a bank account password, a credit card number, a PayPal login, or even a magic sword in an online game, there's a fraudster somewhere trying to misappropriate it for his or her own nefarious purposes. Domain names have always been a target for such criminals. more

July 2010: The End of the Beginning for DNSSEC

July 15, 2010 (yesterday) marked the end of the beginning for DNSSEC, as the DNS root was cryptographically signed. For nearly two decades, security researchers, academics and Internet leaders have worked to develop and deploy Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNSSEC was developed to improve the overall security of the DNS, a need which was dramatized by the discovery of the Kaminsky bug a few years ago. more

DNSSEC Becomes a Reality Today at ICANN Brussels

Attendees at the public ICANN meeting in Brussels today heard from over two dozen companies that have implemented or are planning to support DNSSEC, the next-generation standard protocol for secured domain names. It is clearer than ever before that DNSSEC is becoming a reality. more

More Stepping Stones Before This Summer’s Seminal DNSSEC Events

The deployment of Domain Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has crossed another milestone this month with the publication of DURZ (deliberately unvalidatable root zone) in all DNS root servers on 5 May 2010. While this change was virtually invisible to most Internet users, this event and the remaining testing that will occur over these next two months will dictate the ultimate success of DNSSEC deployment across the Internet. more

DNSSEC No Longer Pie-in-the-Sky: Time to Develop a Strategy

You may have seen media reports a few weeks ago describing how servers behind the so-called Great Firewall of China were found delivering incorrect DNS information to users in the rest of the world, thereby redirecting users to edited Web pages. Reports indicate that this apparently occurred due to a caching error by a single Internet Service Provider. While the problem was fairly limited in scope, it could have entirely been prevented in a world where DNSSEC was fully deployed. more

You Don’t Need to Hack Twitter.com to Control All Its Traffic and Email

A big security news event last night and today is that the Twitter.com Web site was hacked and content on the site replaced. TechCrunch reported it and it has been picked up globally. But - was the Twitter.com website really hacked? We now know it was not so. There are four ways that users typing in Twitter.com would have seen the Iranian Cyber Army page. more

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

So Domain Tasting, where registrants (who may also be registrars) taste names and keep only those that have economic value, is now the target of a federal cybersquatting lawsuit, brought about by lawyers for major brand name retailers Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman against major domain name registrar Dotster. This Dotster lawsuit involves allegations of cybersquatting by registrars who use the Create Grace Period, which is mandated by ICANN for global registries... more

ITU Launches IDN Survey and ccTLD Outreach

Today, the ITU launched a new survey asking member states, ccTLDs and other ITU member organizations to provide answers to a specialized questionnaire asking for their experiences on the use of IDNs. The ITU states that it is reaching out to ccTLDs to "collect information and experiences on Internationalized Domain Names under ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) around the globe." One of the goals of this survey is to collate information on the "needs and practices" of each ccTLD that is surveyed -- so as to compile a report from the ITU that speaks to the implementation of IDNs around the world... more

Finding Good ICANN Board Candidates

In the late summer of 2006, the ICANN Nominating Committee will convene to select three members to the ICANN Board of Directors, and four members to various councils. Depending on the global visibility of the nominees, and the current political and technical currents pulling at the Internet community, these nominations will be both pilloried and lauded in different circles. This process of selecting a good ICANN board member is astonishingly complex; I should know, having served on the founding NomCom in 2003, and the succeeding NomComs in 2004 and 2005. By far the biggest challenge is finding good candidates... more

The Problem With Wikis

Wikis have been around for a long time on the Web. It's taken a while for them to transform from geek tool to a mainstream word, but we're here now. Last week at the ICANN Meeting in Vancouver, it was fun to watch hundreds of people get introduced to Wikis and start using them, thanks to Ray King's ICANN Wiki project. In the past few days since, I've come to believe that Wikis are doomed unless they start thinking about security in a more serious way. more

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

When 72 candidates vie for 8 positions, making tough choices are inevitable. ICANN's 2005 Nominating Committee (Nom-Com) on Friday announced the selection of a diverse and independent set of nominees for important roles in ICANN, including the Board of Directors, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the At-Large Advisory Council (ALAC) and the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO). more

How India’s .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

India is one of the world's fastest growing economies, the global leader in outsourcing and the service computing, and home to over a billion people. But when I first met officials from the Indian government to discuss their plans for .IN, India had a total of just about 7,000 .IN registrations, fewer than most small countries have. ...(Compare to 100,000 names registered last month alone) This is one of the most rapid starts of any domain worldwide. In my conversations with senior officials of the Indian Government and the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) which manages the .IN Registry, they credited three key decisions that proved critical to the success of the domain's re-launch... more