News Briefs

Group Creates International Association for Geographic TLDs

The operators of geographic top-level domains such as .nyc, .london, .berlin and .tokyo have founded an international non-for-profit association in Brussels. more

Obama: From Now On Digital Infrastructure Treated As Strategic National Asset

In a speech today from the White House, President Obama declared that the United States' computers and digital networks are strategic national assets and that he will personally appoint a cybersecurity coordinator to oversee the effort to protect this critical infrastructure. more

Pokemon Go Server Outage, Hacking Group Claims Credit

OurMine claims credit for DDoS attack on Pokemon Go servers: Several news outlets have reported the hacking group OurMine - also notorious for compromising social media accounts of various celebrities - on Monday took responsibility of hacking the game servers. more

Senior U.S. and Chinese Officials Conclude Four-Day Meeting on Cyber Security

Senior U.S. and Chinese officials concluded a four day meeting on Saturday discussing cyber security issues ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington later this month. more

Governments Accused of Trying to Bypass ICANN Policy Making Process

"ICANN faces first post-transition test of UN power (for real this time)," reports Kevin Murphy today in Domain Incite. more

Internet Society Reinforces Need to Connect the Unconnected, Build Trust

The Internet Society's President and CEO, Kathy Brown, has highlighted how connecting the unconnected and building trust are the two most pressing imperatives facing the Internet today. more

Iran Expands Digital Dragnet After Crushing Protests

After quelling nationwide protests, Iran has intensified its use of digital surveillance, deploying phone tracking, facial recognition and online monitoring to identify, intimidate and detain dissenters through a vast state-controlled communications infrastructure. more

Governments Pushing for Greater Control Over Geographic TLDs

Governments are toying with the idea of asking ICANN for greater powers over gTLDs that match their geographic features," Kevin Murphy reporting in Domain Incite. more

Google’s Project Zero Team Discovers Critical Vulnerabilities in Symantec and Norton

"These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets," says Google's Information Security Engineer, Tavis Ormandy, in reference to multiple critical vulnerabilities discovered affecting Symantec, a popular vendor in the enterprise security market. more

UPDATEDFCC Chair Kevin Martin Makes His Departure Official, Announces Resignation

In his last meeting today, Federal Communication Commission (FCC) chairman Kevin J. Martin, announced that he will be leaving the commission and will not be staying in the Obama administration. While the chairman had previously declined commenting on his future plans, the departure did not come unexpected. In the statement after announcing his departure at the FCC meeting, Martin also mentioned that he would depart Jan. 20 to become a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. This announcement follows reports that President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Julius Genachowski to be the next FCC chairman. more

Malware Production Continues at Record-Setting Pace; 6000 Unique Pieces Per Day

Security researches report seeing as much unique malware in the first half of 2009 as seen in all of 2008. "This is quite something when you consider that in 2008 we saw the greatest ever growth in malware," says David Marcus of McAfee Avert Labs. More specifically, Marcus in a blog post writes that the numbers add up to an average of 200,000 unique pieces malware monthly or more than 6,000 a day. "Bear in mind these are malware we consider unique (something we had to write a driver for) and does not count all the other malware we detect generically or heuristically... When you add in the generic and heuristic detections the number becomes truly mind boggling," writes Marucs. more

Third Round of Evaluation Results for New TLDs

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the third round of initial evaluation results, bringing the total number of applicants to pass Initial Evaluation to 93. ICANN has now completed the initial evaluation of all but 13 IDN Top Level Domains. more

Extreme Cyberattack Could Cost as Much as Superstorm Sandy, Says Insurer Lloyd’s of London

A global cyberattack has the potential to cost $120bn in economic losses, roughly the equivalent of a catastrophic natural disaster like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, a scenario described in new research by Lloyd’s of London and Cyence, a cyber-risk analytics modeling firm. more

David J. Farber, Early Architect of the Internet, Dies at 91

David J. Farber, a pioneering computer scientist and mentor to key architects of the Internet Protocol, has died at 91, leaving a legacy that helped transform isolated machines into the global network underpinning modern communication. more

Turkey Blocks Access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp

Access to multiple social media services including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been reported throughout Turkey beginning Friday Nov 04 2016 1:20AM local time – ongoing as of Friday noon. more