Cybersecurity

What Should PGP Look Like?

Those who care about security and usability - that is, those who care about security in the real world - have long known that PGP isn't usable by most people. It's not just a lack of user-friendliness, it's downright user hostile. Nor is modern professional crypto any better. What should be done? How should crypto in general, and PGP in particular, appear to the user? I don't claim to know, but let me pose a few questions. more

Heartbleed: Don’t Panic

There's been a lot of ink and pixels spilled of late over the Heartbleed bug. Yes, it's serious. Yes, it potentially affects almost everyone. Yes, there are some precautions you should take. But there's good news, too: for many people, it's a non-event. Heartbleed allows an attacker to recover a random memory area from a web or email server running certain versions of OpenSSL. The question is what's in that memory. It may be nothing, or it may contain user passwords (this has reportedly been seen on Yahoo's mail service), cryptographic keys, etc. more

Comments on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

The White House has recently released a draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Some of its ideas are good and some are bad. However, I fear it will be a large effort that will do little, and will pose a threat to our privacy. As I've written elsewhere, I may be willing to sacrifice some privacy to help the government protect the nation; I'm not willing to do so to help private companies track me when it's quite useless as a defense. more

Cyber Risk Now on Top of Corporate Risk Agendas, Cyber Insurance Expanding

Results from the 2019 Marsh-Microsoft Global Cyber Risk Perception survey indicates several encouraging signs of improvement in the way organizations view and manage cyber risk. more

Getting a Handle on IDNs

Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs are back in the news. ICANN recently released a document entitled "Proposed Final Implementation for IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process"... In a nutshell, ICANN has now offered a path toward authorizing the adoption of ccTLDs in many countries' native languages. This marks a welcome advance for millions of Internet users who do not speak English or who do not use another language covered by ASCII. But with this advance comes some concerns. more

Let’s Be Careful Out There: Bogus Windows Domains

Last week, my colleagues over at Sunbelt Software discovered a bogus Windows domain being registered earlier this month (where the "w" in "windows" is actually two "v"s). Today, I've been alerted to the fact that are several additional Windows domains which have registered where the "w"s have been also been replaced with "v"s... more

A Brief Primer on Anti-Satellite Warfare Tactics

Satellites make it possible for governments to provide essential services, such as national defense, navigation, and weather forecasting. Private ventures use satellites to offer highly desired services that include video program distribution, telecommunications, and Internet access. The Russian launch of a satellite, with nuclear power and the likely ability to disable satellites, underscores how satellites are quite vulnerable to both natural and manmade ruin. more

The Real Uneven Playing Field of Name Collisions

Recent comments on the name collisions issue in the new gTLD program raise a question about the differences between established and new gTLDs with respect to name collisions, and whether they're on an even playing field with one another. Verisign's latest public comments on ICANN's "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions" Phase One Report, in answering the question, suggest that the playing field the industry should be concerned about is actually in a different place. The following points are excerpted from the comments submitted April 21. more

Verisign Expands MANRS Relationship to Strengthen Global Routing Security

Verisign has been involved with an initiative known as Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, or MANRS, since its inception. MANRS, which is coordinated by the Internet Society, focuses on strengthening the security and resiliency of IP networks throughout the world by identifying and providing best practices for mitigating common routing security threats. MANRS began as a collaboration among network operators and internet exchange providers, with Verisign formally becoming a participant in its Network Operator Program in 2017. more

Russian Security Firm Kaspersky Announces Its Own Secure OS, 14 Years in the Making

"I've anticipated this day for ages -- the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based on our own secure operating system landed on my desk," writes Eugene Kaspersky, Chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, in a blog post introducing company's layer 3 switch powered by Kaspersky OS. more

CallService.biz Shut Down by the FBI

Gary Warner over at Cyber Crime and Doing Time has a good post up this week about the CallService.biz website being shut down. I have posted a few good excerpts and added my comments to the end. ... Warner's take on the world of spam, malware, hacking and phishing is that unless people actually go to jail because they are spamming, the problem of spamming will never get better. That's because when the security industry fixes the latest hole or comes up with a new technology to stop the newest threat, spammers simply move onto another. more

DDOS Attackers - Who and Why?

Bruce Schneier's recent blog post, "Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet", reported that the incidence of DDOS attacks is on the rise. And by this he means that these attacks are on the rise both in the number of attacks and the intensity of each attack. A similar observation was made in the Versign DDOS Trends report for the second quarter of 2015, reporting that DDOS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and persistent in the second quarter of 2016. more

ICANN Doubles Down on Technical Internet Governance Label: What Are the Implications?

Back in September of 2020, ICANN CEO Göran Marby wrote a blog post discussing the implementation of "a common strategy for Internet governance (IG) and technical Internet governance (TIG)", raising the question of whether the ICANN org. intended to pursue this distinction moving forward, as debated in a previous article. This was proven to be the case during the 2020 IGF's Open Forum #44: "ICANN Open Forum - Technical Internet Governance", organized by ICANN itself... more

DNS Survey Results Pandora’s Box of Both Frightening and Hopeful Results, Says Cricket Liu

The fifth-annual survey of domain name servers (DNS) on the public Internet -- called a "Pandora's box of both frightening and hopeful results" -- was released today by The Measurement Factory in partnership with Infoblox. more

Protecting Brands from Phishers No Easy Task

Just in case you've been out of the country for the last 12 months, a new scourge is hitting the Internet and the world of email and it's called phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group defines phishing as identity theft "attacks using 'spoofed' e-mails and fraudulent Websites designed to fool recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords..." According to various experts, the incidents of phishing are rising at an alarming rate: there were 13,000 unique phishing attacks in January alone - that's a 42 percent surge over the previous month. The real problem is that phishing works. more