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For a student final dissertation TV documentary short, 10 minutes, I have ended up choosing to investigate whether the landing stations for trans-atlantic cables are the achilles heel of the internet. As an outsider to the world of internet infrastructure I have been struck by how easy it has been to identify the landing stations in Cornwall and the cables that enter them. (Thank you Google for the aerial photographs) more
A couple of days ago, Threatpost posted an article indicating that the United States is the most bot-infected country... I think that Microsoft's mechanism of measuring bot infections is a good one, not necessarily because it is the most accurate but because it represents the most complete snapshot of botnet statistics. Because Microsoft Windows is installed on so many computers worldwide and because so many users across the world call home to the MSRT, Microsoft is able to collect a very large snapshot of data. more
Within the last year or two, I've heard people express an opinion to the effect that if the domain name industry put as much focus on preventing distributed denial of service attacks as we have on implementing DNSSEC, the Internet would be a safer place. While there may be a grain of truth there, I suggest that this kind of thinking presents us with something of a false dichotomy. more
On Wednesday September 29th at 1PM there will be a meeting in the Old Executive Building in Washington D.C. with Registries and domain Registrars to discuss illegal Internet sales of prescription drugs. ICANN was originally invited but declined because citing "inappropriateness" . One "U.S." Registrar who definitely will not be in attendance is OnlineNIC more
In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, a 'precrime' police unit relies on the visions of psychics to predict future crimes, then arrests the potential perpetrators before they do anything wrong. In the world of Internet governance, the future is now, as regulators want online services to predict and prevent safety threats before they actually occur. more
The more I read, the more I see conflicting views on the state of the criminal cybercrime world. On the one hand, the Russian criminal cybercrime underworld is a scary, organized place... On the other hand, there is the position that that position is an exaggeration of what it is actually like and that it's a bunch of ragtag folks who have some advanced computer skills but they are not formally organized. ... I see this very similarly to how I see cyber warfare... more
A new study has been released by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th President that looks into cybersecurity manpower challenges in the United States. The report titled, "A Human Capital Crisis in Cybersecurity," is produced by CSIS - a bipartisan public and foreign policy think tank in Washington. more
As the shorter of the ICANN interregnums comes to a close and the ICANN faithful finalize their dinner reservation agendas for Brussels, it is time again for a preview of what will be 'on-tap' at next week's ICANN meeting. While, as always, there is a lot going on in ICANN Land, a scan of the blogosphere and ICANN list serves suggests that the four most discussed topics will be... more
On April 16 ICANN issued a breach notice to Turkish Registrar Alantron for not consistently providing access to its WHOIS database via Port 43, a command-line query location that all Registrars are required to supply under conditions of their contract with ICANN under section 3.3.1. Four days later they issued a breach to Internet Group do Brazil for the same problem. ... The WHOIS record, as we all know, is a massive fraud with illicit parties filling records with bogus information and hiding behind anonymity. more
As a registrar at the front end of the DNSSEC deployment effort, our technical team has made a sustained investment in DNSSEC deployment so that our customers don't get overwhelmed by this wave of changes to the core infrastructure of the Domain Name System. Along the way, we've learnt a lot about how to implement DNSSEC which might hold useful lessons for other organizations that plan to deploy DNSSEC in their networks. more
Symantec today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VeriSign's identity and authentication business, which includes the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the VeriSign Trust Services and the VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service. more
As a reader of this article, you are probably familiar with the DNS cache poisoning techniques discovered a few years ago. And you have most likely heard that DNSSEC is the long term cure. But you might not know exactly what challenges are involved with DNSSEC and what experience the early adopters have gathered and documented. Perhaps you waited with our own rollout until you could gather more documentation over the operational experience when rolling out DNSSEC. This article summarizes authors' experiences and learnings from implementing the technology in production environments as well as discusses associated operational issues. more
Last week at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, a plan was announced by ICANN staff to create a "CERT" for DNS. That's a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) for the global Domain Name System (DNS). There are all kinds of CERTs in the world today, both inside and outside the Internet industry. There isn't one for DNS, and that's basically my fault, and so I have been following the developments in Nairobi this week very closely. more
Joseph Menn has an article on CNN.com wherein the crux of the story is that US experts are closing in on the hackers that broke into Google last month. It is believed by some that the Chinese government sponsored these hackers. China, naturally, denied involvement. My own take is that tools today are sophisticated enough such that you don't necessarily need state sponsorship in order to launch a cyber attack. more
Maybe you saw the stories recently about comments that were made at a recent World Economic Forum debate on cyberwarfare. As one of them notes, Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, proposed a treaty in which countries would pledge not to attack each other without having been attacked. This post isn't about Mr. Toure's proposal. It's about a comment the story attributes to Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft. According to The Raw Story, Mundie "called for a `driver's license' for internet users." more
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