News Briefs

China Says It Will Use All Means, Including Military, to Ensure Online Security

"Beijing vowed on Tuesday to use all necessary means, including military ones, to wipe out subversion and attempts to undermine its sovereignty in cyberspace," Zhuang Pinghui reporting in South China Morning Post. more

UPDATEDFacebook Outage Possibly Global

Craig Labovitz reporting from Arbor Networks: "We use ATLAS data to graph Facebook (AS32934) traffic with 80 ISPs around the world between 5pm September 22 and 5pm EDT today. You can see Facebook traffic plummet around 1:30pm and return shortly after 4pm. From a quick glance at the data, the outage appears to be global (impacting most of the 80 ISPs)." more

US New Cybersecurity Strategy Includes Military Option

Defense Systems reports: "The U.S. government's sweeping new cybersecurity strategy announced May 16 states that the country will respond to a major cyberattack using any or all of the means at its disposal, reports the Associated Press. Although military response to a cyberattack is one of the options listed in the International Strategy for Cyberspace, it will be considered only as a last resort, officials said." more

Facebook Announces New Privacy and Security Settings Amid Outcry Over Data Collection Practices

In a blog post published today on its website, Facebook has announced it has adjusted its privacy settings in order to give its users more control over their information. more

Jan 28: International Data Privacy Day

January 28 is marked as International Data Privacy Day in order to help raise awareness and generate discussions about information privacy. This year companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Google, AT&T, LexisNexis and The Privacy Projects are sponsoring Data Privacy Day efforts. more

ICANN Appoints IID’s Rod Rasmussen to Its Security and Stability Advisory Committee

ICANN has appointed IID President and CTO Rod Rasmussen to its Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). An area that Rasmussen's work and recent SSAC reports have both covered in-depth is domain name hijacking. Recent hijackings against UFC.com and Coach.com, and similar past attacks against CheckFree, Comcast and Twitter have heightened awareness about the security dangers with the Internet's infrastructure. more

Cloudflare Uses Lava Lamps to Generate Encryption Keys

The web performance and security company, Cloudflare has shared one of the methods it uses to ensure randomness when generating encryption keys. more

Greatest Internet Landgrab in History

Paul Sloan reporting in CNET: "ICANN tomorrow will reveal who is going after what new domain extensions, paving the way for a very different looking Web. Prepare for dot-madness... It's not just the hard-core denizens of the domain world that are going after new TLDs, which are also known as 'strings.' Others are jumping into the fray. The most intriguing is Google, which in late May revealed that it's applying for an undisclosed number of strings, including .Google, .YouTube, .docs, and .lol..." more

Neustar Announces Intention to Separate Into Two Independent and Publicly Traded Companies

This move will allow the company to separate its call routing services for telecom carriers from its marketing and security related services. Additionally the company has indicated that the latter unit, that is marketing, security, and data services, will be rebranded. more

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Guliani Appointed to “Chair” Cyber Task Force

Transition spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters today that former New York City Mayo, Rudy Giuliani will "chair" the cyber task force that Trump announced last Friday. The task force is given three months from Trump's inauguration to deliver a cybersecurity plan. more

AFNIC CEO Elected as New CENTR Chair

CENTR is the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, gathering more than 50 registries such as DENIC for Germany (.de), Nominet for the United Kingdom (.uk) or Switch for Switzerland (.ch). The election took place during CENTR's General Assembly held in Warsaw on February 25 and 26. Mathieu Weill, AFNIC's CEO, replaces Andrzej Bartosiewicz, from the Polish registry, NASK, whose term was coming to an end. more

Huawei Says They Are Willing to Sign No-Spy Agreements With Governments

During a London conference, Huawei's chairman Liang Hua told reporters the company would sign no-spy agreements with governments as a response to United States' pressure on Europe to bar the Chinese telecommunications company over spying concerns. more

FCC Pushing for Free Internet Plan, Called Most Controversial Issue in December

Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups. The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. more

Team Behind Google Chrome Wants to Challenge How URLs are Displayed in the Browser

Google's Chrome browser has turned 10 and to commemorate the occasion, the company is rolling out a revamped design along with a series of new features, including a more powerful omnibox. more

GoDaddy Reveals Its Network Suffered a Multi-Year Security Compromise

On Friday, GoDaddy revealed that it had suffered a multi-year security compromise that allowed unknown attackers to steal company source code, customer and employee login credentials, and install malware that redirected customer websites to malicious sites. more