Cybersecurity

An Investigative Analysis of the Silent Librarian IoCs

The Silent Librarian advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have been detected once again, as the academic year started in September. With online classes increasingly becoming the norm, the group's phishing campaigns that aim to steal research data and intellectual property could have a high success rate. Dozens of phishing domain names have been reported, although some may have already been taken down. more

Beyond Smart Cards and Guns in Schools

On January 8, 2013, a Judge from the United States District Court in Texas ruled against a high school sophomore's refusal to wear a smart identity card embedded with a radio frequency chip which is part of the school's smart ID card student locator project. The Judgment show the Testimonies of Superintendent and the Principal in stating that the sensors do not give exact readings nor are they able to pinpoint the exact location of the students. more

Microsoft Becomes the Latest Company to Join the Internet Society’s MANRS Initiative

Microsoft has joined the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative, supported by the Internet Society (ISOC) with the primary objective is to reduce the most common threats to the Internet's routing system. Microsft is the latest of a number of industry giants around the world - including Oracle, GÉANT, and Comcast - to join MANRS. more

DNS: The Basis for Billions

In the midst of "Cyber Monday", the day traditionally seen as one of the year's busiest days for online shopping, it is only appropriate to examine the importance DNS plays for online economies. With DNS being at the heart of Internet connectivity it is easy to understand why DNS is important to the growing health of economies whose online health in dollars and euros rest in the billions. more

The DNSSEC “Onus of Reality Check” Shifted to gTLD Administrations by ICANN

Last month, there was an exchange of letters between a gTLD administration and ICANN about DNSSEC deployment. This gTLD administration is PIR or Public Interest Registry, the gTLD administration for the .org TLD. Interestingly, PIR is a non-profit organization that makes significant contributions to ISOC (Internet Society) initiatives: thus, both ICANN and PIR are organizations dedicated to the well-being of the Internet. more

DNSSEC Successes, Statistics and Innovation Streaming Live from ICANN 53 on 24 June 2015

Where has DNSSEC been successful? What are some current statistics about DNSSEC deployment? What are examples of innovations that are happening with DNSSEC and DANE? All of these questions will be discussed at the DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires happening on Wednesday, June 24, 2015, from 09:00 – 15:15 Argentina time (UTC-3). You can watch and listen to the session live. more

Qatar Crisis Started With a Hack, Now Political Tsunami in Saudi Arabia - How Will You Be Impacted?

The world has officially entered what the MLi Group labels as the "New Era of The Unprecedented". In this new era, traditional cyber security strategies are failing on daily basis, political and terrorist destruction-motivated cyber attacks are on the rise threatening "Survivability", and local political events unfold to impact the world overnight and forever. Decision makers know they cannot continue doing the same old stuff, but don't know what else to do next or differently that would be effective. more

Helping Banks Fight Phishing and Account Fraud, Whether They Like It or Not

On Wednesday, Project Honey Pot filed an unusual lawsuit against "John Does stealing money from US businesses through unauthorized electronic transfers made possible by computer viruses transmitted in spam." Their attorney is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, who is one of the most experienced anti-spam lawyers around, with whom I have worked in the past. more

Help CrypTech (and Me) Make the Internet More Secure

Are you ready to help me make the Internet more secure? Here's your chance to join me in a project to create an open-source hardware device to protect email, files and other data from hackers and government spies. The CrypTech Project was founded in late 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US and other governments were exploiting weak cryptography and loose standards to gain access to citizens' email, documents, and other files. more

We Have a Paradigm for Surveillance That’s Broken, Fit Only for the Analogue Past

As each day brings new revelations about surveillance online, we are starting to see increasing activity in national legislatures intended either to establish more control over what the security services can do to their nationals (in countries like the US), or to limit access by foreign secret services to the personal information of their citizens (countries like Brazil). Unfortunately, neither of these approaches address the underlying problem: we have a paradigm for surveillance that's fit for the analogue past, not the digital present, let alone the future. more

Meta Lawsuit Leads to Significant Decline in Phishing Domains Tied to Freenom

A lawsuit filed by Meta has led to a significant decrease in phishing websites tied to the domain name registrar Freenom. Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs in a report on Friday said that Freenom, which provides free domain name registration services, was a favored resource for cybercriminals due to its policy of protecting customer identities. more

New CEO Stresses ICANN’s Role in Cybersecurity

One summer sport in Internet governance is speculating on what direction ICANN's new CEO will take it in. Making the media rounds yesterday on Fox and Lehrer News Hour to talk about the recent DDoS attacks on US and S. Korea government and commercial websites, new CEO Rod Beckstrom pushed how the response to cyber attacks is a coordinated effort, he also alluded to ICANN's role in similar attacks. Responding to a question on the News Hour about the USG policy response to dealing with cyber attacks, Beckstrom highlighted the critical role of ISP filtering, and identified the "organic" as well as "somewhat structured" coordination which occurs during a typical response. More interestingly, he plugged ICANN's facilitating role. more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

Understanding the Modern DDoS Threat

The breadth of cyber threats that an organization must engage with and combat seemingly change on a daily basis. Each new technology, vulnerability or exploit vector results in a new threat that must be protected against. Meanwhile some forms of attack never appear to age -- they remain a threat to business continuity despite years of advances in defensive strategy. One particularly insidious and never-ending threat is that of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. more

Call for Participation – ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop, October 2020

If you are interested in presenting at the ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop during the week of 17-22 October 2020, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to [email protected] by 27 August 2020. We are open to a wide range of topics related to DNS, DNSSEC, DANE, routing security, and more. There are some ideas in the Call for Participation below, but other ideas are definitely welcome, too! more