Cybersecurity

Biden Administration Bans Kaspersky Software Over National Security Concerns

The Biden administration is set to prohibit the sale of Kaspersky Lab's antivirus software in the U.S., citing national security risks due to the company's ties to the Russian government. more

Is Cybersecurity a Priority? You Wouldn’t Know It If You Go by Top Level Defections

In the US administration, we see important people like incoming Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta say at his Senate confirmation hearing that "a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor" could well be a cyberattack that cripples the U.S. power grid and financial and government systems. He also said that cybersecurity will be one of the main focuses of his tenure at the Pentagon. But when you look at what is actually happening in cyber security, there is more position jockeying than there is real progress. more

Regulation and Reason

Imagine living in a country where it was necessary to register with your community government by providing a copy of one of the following... This may be necessary in perhaps a large number of nations. However, as a United States citizen and resident, I was quite surprised when my local community issued the request. I investigated and found much to my dismay, that my community in fact was required by regulation to survey its residents on a biennial basis. more

Better “Always-On” DDoS Mitigation

Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks have been the frustration of information technology professionals for many years. When asked, most tell you they wish their internet service providers (ISPs) would simply provide them "clean pipes" all the time and take care of DDoS attacks upstream before they ever get to them. Unfortunately, the resources (equipment and personnel) necessary to clean Internet connections all the time are very expensive and come with several downsides. more

An Interoperable IoT? Deadline of Feb 22 for Proposals for IoT Semantic Interoperability Workshop

How can we make the Internet of Things (IoT) more interoperable? How can we help ensure that when you buy a light bulb from one IoT vendor it will work with the light bulb from another IoT vendor? How can we avoid getting to a place where we have to use many different apps to control all the different devices in our homes? As we said in the Internet Society's IoT Overview: Understanding the Issues and Challenges of a More Connected World, "a fragmented environment of proprietary IoT technical implementations will inhibit value for users and industry. more

Report On National Online Cybercrime and Online Threats Reporting Centres

Today I released a report on 'National cyber crime and online threats reporting centres. A study into national and international cooperation'. Mitigating online threats and the subsequent enforcing of violations of laws often involves many different organisations and countries. Many countries are presently engaged in erecting national centres aimed at reporting cyber crime, spam or botnet mitigation. more

German High Court Says No to Retaining Telecom, Email Data for Tracking Criminal Networks

The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."
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Probability of ROI and Tighter Network Security by Blocking Malicious Subdomains

Failing to block a stealthy malicious host from making connections to your network could cost your company millions of dollars, a damaged reputation, and severe losses in sensitive private data. Threat intel teams have faced on-going problems: Expensive feeds that are slow to catch new threats; Chasing false positives in alerts wastes time and money; and Vendors selling a new appliance for every ill. Would 100% of your users Spot the Bot? more

A Cynic’s View of 2015 Security Predictions - Part 2

Every year those in the security industry are bombarded with various cyber security predictions. There's the good, the bad and the ugly. Some predictions are fairly ground breaking, while others are just recycled from previous years -- that's allowed of course if the threats still stand. In part one of my predictions I looked at the malware threats, so let's take a look at big data and the cloud for part two. more

Restricting Anti-Virus Won’t Work

In a blog post, Stewart Baker proposed restricting access to sophisticated anti-virus software as a way to limit the development of sophisticated malware. It won't work, for many different and independent reasons. To understand why, though, it's necessary to understand how AV programs work. The most important technology used today is the "signature" - a set of patterns of bytes - of each virus. Every commercial AV program on the market operates on a subscription model... more

How Dormant Domains Can Be Weaponized During Events Like the 2024 U.S. Election

As with any high-stakes event, elections have become a prime target for cybercriminals seeking to exploit public trust through impersonation, misinformation, and scams. CSC's comprehensive research about the 2024 U.S. Election reveals the alarming role of dormant domains, which have the potential to be exploited for launching cyber attacks against political campaigns, organizations, and constituents. more

Facebook and PGP

Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It's an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook's possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting. The first question, of course, is why Facebook has done this. It will only appeal to a very small minority of users. Using encrypted email is not easy. more

How to Steal Reputation

The term "reputation hijacking" continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press. It's intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else's system -- usually one of the large webmail providers -- to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they're hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider's IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new... more

RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days. So this is by no means all that was presented through the week... As is usual for RIPE meetings, it was a well organised, informative and fun meeting to attend in every respect! If you are near Copenhagen in late May next year I'd certainly say that it would be a week well spent. more

Are Phishing and Malware Separate Threats?

Phishing is when bad guys try to impersonate a trusted organization, so they can steal your credentials. Typically they'll send you a fake e-mail that appears to be from a bank, with a link to a fake website that also looks like the bank. Malware offers another more insidious way to steal your credentials, by running unwanted code on your computer... I like VeriSign's characterization of this kind of malware as an insecure endpoint, the PC which is the endpoint of the conversation with the bank isn't actually under the control of the person who's using it. more