Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports that an "investigation shows the spam run worked by abusing a weakness at GoDaddy that allowed the scammers to hijack at least 78 domains belonging to Expedia, Mozilla, Yelp, and other legitimate people or organizations." more
For the non-state actors who are making efforts to approach cybersecurity issue in a different and creative way, the state actors, however, have given clear signs that they have exhausted their patience and insisted on doing things alone by bringing traditional old tricks back into cyberspace. This is exemplified in the bilateral meeting of two cyber sovereigntists - the Chinese and U.S. presidents on April 6-7, and in the multilateral G7 Declaration on Responsible States Behavior in Cyberspace on April 11. more
BP and the Oil Industry are taking a lot of heat these days - much of it rightly so. Moving beyond the drama and evaluating the overall response of BP and others reinforces much of what is taught in incident response training and preparation... by showing the outcomes when one does not respond well. This is probably the most important incident that the responders involved will deal with in their professional lives. For those of us working to protect Internet Infrastructure and resources there are useful lessons as we consider what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico and their response effort. more
The King is dead. Long live the King! Or, given this week's events, should the phrase now be "Kelihos is dead. Long live Kelihos"? It is with a little amusement and a lot of cynicism that I've been watching the kerfuffle relating to the latest attempt to take down the Kelihos botnet. You may remember that a similar event ("Kelihos is dead") occurred late last year after Microsoft and Kaspersky took it on themselves to shut down the botnet known as Kelihos (or sometimes as Waledac 2.0 or Hlux). more
Over 260 global network and security experts have collectively responded to the newly proposed FCC rules laid out in ET Docket No. 15-170 for RF Devices such as Wi-Fi routers by proposing a new approach to improve the security of these devices. The letter warns FCC ruling will cause more harm than good and risk a significant overreach of the Commission's authority. more
Karachi-based Bank Islami revealed Saturday morning that it had detected abnormal transactions resulting in 2.6 million Pakistani rupees, roughly $19,500 and precautionary steps where taken immediately. more
There are thousands of articles perpetuating the claim that China is out to get us on the Internet. And yet, all these discussions are begging the question, is it China attacking? Also, are they even the "usual suspects"?
While I can point to real facts of China making active use of information warfare, cyber warfare, or whatever else you choose to call it (such as the release of 0 days being patched by Microsoft and originally reported by the Taiwanese government, search Microsoft's site), I can also point to Germany (intelligence Trojan horse), the US (The Farewell Dossier) and other countries such as North Korea (without much detail, so questioned)... more
Massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against ISPs and their customers have almost doubled over the past year, according to a new security report. Attacks on networks making them unavailable to intended users -- also known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks -- exceeded 40 gigabits in the last year according to Arbor Networks' annual survey of ISPs from North America, South America, Europe and Asia. more
On Thursday, Oct 1, 2015, from 9:30am-4:30pm US EDT (UTC-4), Dyn will be holding their "TechToberFest" event in Manchester, NH, and also streaming the video live for anyone interested. There are a great set of speakers and a solid agenda. As I wrote on the Internet Society blog, I'll be part of the security panel from 3-4pm US EDT... and we who are on the panel are excited to participate just for the conversation that we are going to have! It should be fun! more
Close to 1300 IP addresses were hijacked this morning resulting in Amazon losing control of a number of its highly used cloud services. more
Encryption is fundamental to our daily life. Practically everything we do online makes use of encryption is some form. Access to our financial transactions, health records, government services, and exchanged private messages are all protected by strong encryption. Encryption is the process of changing the information in such a way as to make it unreadable by anyone except for those possessing special knowledge (usually referred to as a "key"), which allows them to change the information back to its original, readable form. more
According to various news outlets, Russia is reported to be planning a complete Internet shut down, as part of a test of its cyber-defenses. more
A study conducted by the Verizon Business RISK team in cooperation with the United States Secret Service has found that breaches of electronic records in 2009 involved more insider threats, greater use of social engineering and the continued strong involvement of organized criminal groups. more
Most people - mistakenly - believe that they are perfectly safe behind a firewall, network address translation (NAT) device or proxy. The fact is quite the opposite: if you can get out of your network, someone else can get in. Attackers often seek to compromise the weakest link in a network and then use that access to attack the network from the inside, commonly known as a "pivot-and-attack." more
According to Shanghai Daily, there has been an "organized Internet attack on Tuesday night which caused serious congestion in several provinces [in China] and left millions of users unable to gain access to the Internet." This is the first time the regulator has published news about an investigation into an online attack in China within 24 hours, says Shanghai Daily. ..."It was an attack on DNS (Domain Name System) and the carriers and related firms should do more back-up to avoid similar incidents," the ministry said in a statement. more
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