The frequency of DDoS attacks has risen by 40% year on year while the duration of attacks decreased with 77% lasting ten minutes or less, according to a new report released by Corero Network Security. more
It is not often I go out to my driveway to pick up the Washington Post -- yes, I still enjoy reading a real physical paper, perhaps a sign of age -- and the headline is NOT about how the (insert DC sports team here) lost last night but is instead is about an IT technology. That technology is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a major Internet protocol that has been around for more than a quarter century, before the Internet was commercialized and before most people even knew what the Internet was. more
At ICANN's meeting in Egypt last week, I had the opportunity to try and explain to various non-technical audiences why the Domain Name System (DNS) is vulnerable to attack, and why that is important, without needing a computer science degree to understand it. Here is the summary. more
Possibly the first documented native IPv6 DDoS attack reported today suggests a DNS dictionary attack which originated from around 1,900 different native IPv6 hosts, on more than 650 different networks. more
In January we presented the glorious history of the MIT spam conference, today we present the schedule for the first day. Opening session will be from this author, Garth Buren with a topic entitled The Internet Doomsday Book, with details be released the same day as the presentation. Followed by Dr. Robert Bruen with a review of activities since the last MIT spam conference... more
You may not connect the cheap cigarettes sold under the counter (or out of a trunk, bodega or by a street vendor) with the mysterious charges on your credit card that you don't remember making or the cash that has, somehow, just disappeared from your bank account. You also may not connect that website selling cheap cigarettes made in second and third world countries with Shellshock or whatever the fashionably scary cyber-threat of the day is when you're reading this. more
U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI today released a technical alert based joint-effort analysis of methods behind North Korea’s cyberattacks. more
A water utility in Europe was compromised by cryptocurrency malware mining attack; the attack is the first public discovery of an unauthorized cryptocurrency miner impacting industrial controls systems. more
The DNS root servers were reported by Verisign to be under unexpected attack from name servers across the Internet following ICANN's recent changes to their cryptographic master keys. more
Conventional thinking or solutions will no longer work in the new era of ISIS and the 'Unprecedented' cyber and non-cyber attacks we live in today. Like it or not, everyone is impacted, and no one is immune. Whether you are an average citizen, a chairman or CEO of a multinational, or a government or academic institution leader, the questions to ponder are: Do you know what to do next? Do you know what the solution is? more
Yesterday's DDoS attack against DNSimple brought to light a longstanding need for DNS nameserver operators to have an ability to unilaterally repudiate domains from their nameservers. The domains under attack started off on DNSMadeEasy, migrated off to DNSimple and took up residence there for about 12 hours, causing a lot of grief to DNSimple and their downstream customers. more
Three vectors were exploited in the recent DDoS attack against Spamhaus: 1) Amplification of DNS queries through the use of DNSSEC signed data; 2) Spoofed source addresses due to lack of ingress filtering (BCP-38) on originating networks; 3) Utilisation of multiple open DNS resolvers While. 1) is unavoidable simply due to the additional data that DNSSEC produces, and 2) "should" be practised as part of any provider's network configuration, it is 3) that requires "you and I" ensure that systems are adequately configured. more
Last week at RSA, Bruce Schneier gave a talk on the top 3 emerging threats on the Internet. Whereas we in the security field usually talk about spam, malware and cyber crime, he talked about three meta-trends that all have the potential to be more dangerous than the cybercriminals. Here are my notes. more
Much has been said about the criticality of the small coterie of large-scale content distribution platforms and their critical role in today's Internet. These days when one of the small set of core content platforms experiences a service outage, then it's mainstream news, as we saw in June of this year with outages reported in both Fastly and Akamai. In the case of Akamai, the June outage impacted three of Australia's largest banks, their national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline... more
We've all heard the term, "you're only as strong as your weakest link." Whether talking about a tug of war on the playground, a sports team, or a business, this rings as true as ever. Every business relies on a series of suppliers and vendors -- be it the dairy farm supplying milk to the multinational food manufacturer or the payment systems that retailers use. These links form supply chains that every business, large and small, deals with. There is simply no way around it. more