One of the most striking and enduring dichotomies in the conceptualization of electronic communication networks is summed up in the phrase "the Internet as weapon." With each passing day, it seems that the strident divergence plays in the press -- the latest being Tim's lament about his "web" vision being somehow perverted. The irony is that the three challenges he identified would have been better met if he had instead pursued a career at the Little Theatre of Geneva and let SGML proceed to be implemented on OSI internets rather than refactoring it as HTML to run on DARPA internets. more
Most engineers focus on purely technical mechanisms for defending against various kinds of cyber attacks, including "the old magic bullet," the firewall. The game of cannons and walls is over, however, and the cannons have won; those who depend on walls are in for a shocking future. What is the proper response, then? What defenses are there The reality is that just like in physical warfare, the defenses will take some time to develop and articulate. more
With traditional cyber strategies failing businesses and governments daily, and the rise of a new breed of destruction-motivated Poli-Cyber terrorism threatening "Survivability", what are top decision makers to do next? There is a global paradigm change in the cyber and non-cyber threat landscape, and to address it the industry has to offer innovative solutions. more
The year 2016 will go down in infamy for a number of reasons. It was the year an armed militia occupied an Oregon wildlife refuge, Britain voted to Brexit, an overarching event that will simply be referred to as The Election occurred, and Justin Bieber made reluctant beliebers out of all of us. 2016 was also the worst year on record for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by a margin that can only be considered massive. more
In a joint announcement today, Dutch research institute CWI and Google revealed that they have broken the SHA-1 internet security standard "in practice". more
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent, says Deloitte in its annual Global Predictions report. more
In a blog post published today on Microsoft's website, company President and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, has raised concerns over escalating cyberattcks over the past year and the need for a Digital Geneva Convention. more
In the first post on DDoS, I considered some mechanisms to disperse an attack across multiple edges (I actually plan to return to this topic with further thoughts in a future post). The second post considered some of the ways you can scrub DDoS traffic. This post is going to complete the basic lineup of reacting to DDoS attacks by considering how to block an attack before it hits your network -- upstream. more
NANOG 69 was held in Washington DC in early February. Here are my notes from the meeting. It would not be Washington without a keynote opening talk about the broader political landscape, and NANOG certainly ticked this box with a talk on international politics and cyberspace. I did learn a new term, "kinetic warfare," though I'm not sure if I will ever have an opportunity to use it again! more
President Donald Trump expected to sign an executive order on cyber security on Tuesday. more
US law-enforcement agencies are at risk of being spied on and hacked because some of their field offices are located in foreign-owned buildings without even knowing it. more
2016 broke the previous all-time high, set back in 2013, for the number of records exposed from reported data breaches. more
Many organizations are struggling to overcome key conceptual differences between today's AI-powered threat detection systems and legacy signature detection systems. A key friction area -- in perception and delivery capability -- lies with the inertia of Indicator of Compromise (IoC) sharing; something that is increasingly incompatible with the machine learning approaches incorporated into the new breed of advanced detection products. more
Distributed Denial of Service is a big deal -- huge pools of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as security cameras, are compromised by botnets and being used for large scale DDoS attacks. What are the tools in hand to fend these attacks off? The first misconception is that you can actually fend off a DDoS attack. There is no magical tool you can deploy that will allow you to go to sleep every night thinking, "tonight my network will not be impacted by a DDoS attack." more
Despite widespread concern about the security of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, organizations are ill-prepared for the risks they pose, according to a research report issued today from Ponemon Institute, IBM Security, and Arxan Technologies. more
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