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Cybersecurity / Featured Blogs

How You Can Be Hijacked Without Actually Being Hacked

Unsuspecting website visitors are often unaware when they have landed on a spoofed page or are re-directed to malware-hosting web servers designed to steal their sensitive data and information. This attack is known as subdomain hijacking, or subdomain takeover. A web user's private information is then traded on the dark web, and cybercriminals profit, further fueling the expansion of identity theft in the online world. more

Humans’ Best Defense Against Cybersecurity

At regular intervals, I have discussed the cybersecurity situation in Australia. In those assessments, I wrote about my frustration that the previous government policies more or less resembled a fire brigade approach. Trying to address individual incidents with regulations and legislation rather than coming up with a holistic strategy. more

Risk vs Benefit: The Impact of Shorter 90-Day SSL Certificate Life Cycles

In today's digital age, securing your website and ensuring your users' safety has never been more critical. Secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates are the go-to solution for securing websites by encrypting the data transmitted between web servers and browsers. Historically, SSL digital certificates could be valid for years, after which they had to be renewed or replaced.  more

U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy and Its Impact on Domain Security

Last month, the U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy was launched, providing a new roadmap for stronger collaboration between those operating within the digital ecosystem. The strategy calls on software makers and American industry to take far greater responsibility to assure that their systems cannot be hacked while accelerating efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department to disrupt the activities of hackers and ransomware groups around the world. more

Minimized DNS Resolution: Into the Penumbra

Over the past several years, domain name queries - a critical element of internet communication - have quietly become more secure, thanks, in large part, to a little-known set of technologies that are having a global impact. Verisign CTO Dr. Burt Kaliski covered these in a recent Internet Protocol Journal article, and I'm excited to share more about the role Verisign has performed in advancing this work and making one particular technology freely available worldwide. more

Processing Domain Data to Improve Business Continuity as a Domain Name Registry

In the fall of 2022, around 9,000 numeric domain names such as 0146.se, 0148.se, 0149.se, and so on were registered in the .SE zone. These domains were registered with two registrars, Register.eu and 1API. They had the same kind of SSL certificate, and there were other similarities among them that strongly suggested they were connected. All these domains were registered after September 1, 2022, but not on the same date... more

An Extortionists Fire Sale of TikTok to a US Company Would Be Un-American and Futile

In the latest twist of the US-China spat, President Trump has his sights on TikTok, the short-form video-sharing platform and ByteDance subsidiary. On July 31, President Trump threatened to ban TikTok because it was a threat to US national security. On August 6, he made good on his threat when he signed an Executive Order to that effect. President Trump tightened the screws with an August 14 Executive Order requiring ByteDance to divest its assets in the US and destroy any TikTok data on its US users within 90 days. more

OARC-40: Notes on the Recent DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Centre Workshop

OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with presentations on various DNS topics. Here are some observations I picked up from the presentations in that meeting... In a world where every DNS name is DNSSEC-signed, and every DNS client validates all received DNS responses, we wouldn't necessarily have the problem of DNS spoofing. Even if we concede that universal use of DNSSEC is a long time off ... more

Trust and Insecurity

When I was first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed they were inside a safe environment and didn't consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems hadn't yet provided file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate. more

Domains Under the Most-Abused TLDs: Same Old DNS Abuse Trends?

While threat actors can use any domain across thousands of top-level domains (TLDs), they often have favorites. For instance, you may be familiar with Spamhaus's 10 most-abused TLDs for spamming. WhoisXML API researchers recently built on this list by analyzing 40,000 newly registered domains (NRDs) that sported some of the listed unreputable TLDs. We called this study "DNS Abuse Trends: Dissecting the Domains Under the Most-Abused TLDs." more