Cybersecurity

Caring About Cybersecurity or Preparing the Ground for an I-Patriot Act?

Few months ago in a talk given at the Institution of Engineering and Technology organised here in London by the Society for Computers and Law, Professor Lessig recounted a conversation he had with former US Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, where Larry asked the question that many had in mind... how the US Government managed to conceptualize, design and draft a piece of legislation as vast and complex as the USA PATRIOT Act in such a short period of time (a month and 15 days after 9/11), and the answer was what many people had imagined... more

Russia Targeted British Telecom, Media, Energy Sectors, Reveals UK National Cyber Security Centre

Speaking at The Times Tech Summit in London, Ciaran Martin, chief of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), warned Russia is seeking to undermine the international system. more

Chinese Scientists Have Built First Quantum Network With No Danger of Being Decrypted

A paper published by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reports a successful demonstration of satellite-based entanglement distribution to receiver stations separated by more than 1200 km -- the results illustrate the possibility of a future global quantum communication network. more

An Investigation Shows How Bomb Threat Scammers Hijacked Thousands of Big-Name Domains

Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports that an "investigation shows the spam run worked by abusing a weakness at GoDaddy that allowed the scammers to hijack at least 78 domains belonging to Expedia, Mozilla, Yelp, and other legitimate people or organizations." more

Tackling Cyber Security: Should We Trust the Libertarians? Part 2

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post posing the question of whether or not more government regulation is required in order to secure the Internet. On the one hand, anonymity is viewed in the west as a forum for freedom of speech. The anonymity of the Internet allows dissidents to speak up against unpopular governments. However, the anonymity afforded by the Internet is not so much by design as it is byproduct of its original designers not seeing how widespread it would eventually become. more

Encryption, Our Last Line of Defense

Encryption is fundamental to our daily life. Practically everything we do online makes use of encryption is some form. Access to our financial transactions, health records, government services, and exchanged private messages are all protected by strong encryption. Encryption is the process of changing the information in such a way as to make it unreadable by anyone except for those possessing special knowledge (usually referred to as a "key"), which allows them to change the information back to its original, readable form. more

Internet Governance Survey: What You Told Us

What do people perceive to be the top issues facing the Internet today? How can stakeholders work more effectively together to strengthen the governance mechanisms meant to address these issues? And when it comes to the Internet Society, what should our role be and where should we focus our attention? To help inform our work in Internet governance, we posed these and other questions to our community in February. We had an overwhelming response with over 800 people taking a few minutes of their time to answer our survey. more

Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates - But Why?

Microsoft is shipping a patch to eliminate SHA-1 hashes from its update process. There's nothing wrong with eliminating SHA-1 - but their reasoning may be very interesting. SHA-1 is a "cryptographic hash function". That is, it takes an input file of any size and outputs 20 bytes. An essential property of cryptographic hash functions is that in practice (though obviously not in theory), no two files should have the same hash value unless the files are identical. more

Essential Cyber Security Steps for Your Business

Layered security is a concept that's important for anyone who wants to create a strong, successful defense strategy to understand. This is a strategy that relies on the use of multiple lines of defense in an attempt to repel any potential attacks. For this reason, it's based on the principle that says "no single form of protection is enough to stop a determined cybercriminal. more

DNSSEC Root Signature, Almost There!

IT security specialists have known for years that the plain DNS is not to be trusted. Any hope for improvement rests on the DNSSEC protocol deployment. In this post, I will review the current status in one critical aspect, namely the DNS root signature key management. The other two foremost are the application usage of DNSSEC protocol functionality and the operational front, or the extent of deployment in the DNS infrastructure. The operational front includes the support by the DNS root nameservers, but my focus on signature key management leaves this issue aside. more

The Uses and Abuses of Cryptography

Another day, another data breach, and another round of calls for companies to encrypt their databases. Cryptography is a powerful tool, but in cases like this one it's not going to help. If your OS is secure, you don't need the crypto; if it's not, the crypto won't protect your data. In a case like the Anthem breach, the really sensitive databases are always in use. more

BP and Incident Response: How Well Do Oil and Security Mix?

BP and the Oil Industry are taking a lot of heat these days - much of it rightly so. Moving beyond the drama and evaluating the overall response of BP and others reinforces much of what is taught in incident response training and preparation... by showing the outcomes when one does not respond well. This is probably the most important incident that the responders involved will deal with in their professional lives. For those of us working to protect Internet Infrastructure and resources there are useful lessons as we consider what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico and their response effort. more

Patient Care Suffers When Data Security is a Budgetary Concern

According to a recent Homeland Security News Wire article, nearly 8 million patient medical records were compromised over the course of the previous two years due to data security breaches. As more hospitals and patient care providers move to store patient data electronically -- primarily as a cost savings effort -- the risk and exposure of our private medical information increases while our individual control over this information diminishes. more

Reducing the Risks of BYOD with DNS-Based Security Intelligence; Part 1: Understanding the Risks

Ah, BYOD. How I love thee. BYOD, or "Bring Your Own Device", gives me choices. I can use a device at work I actually like and am most effective with. (How did I ever get by without my iPad?) But BYOD comes with challenges. Personal devices can be infected with malware. Once they're connected to an enterprise's network, they can be controlled by a bot master to hijack enterprise resources and wreak havoc as part of a botnet. more

India Seeks Alternatives to NSO Group Spyware Amid Global Snooping Scandals

The Indian government is seeking to acquire new spyware in an effort to replace the controversial Pegasus system, which has been blacklisted by the US government. more