Cybersecurity

Continued Threats from Malware

As part of my job, I manage an incident response team that was engaged by a significant organization in Georgia whose network was infected by the QBOT (a.k.a. QAKBOT) malware. The customer had been infected for over a year, several teams before ours had failed to solve the problem, and they continued to get reinfected by the malware when they thought they had eradicated it. Over time it had spread to more than 1,000 computers in their ecosystem stealing user credentials along the way. more

The IPv6 Divide: How Slow Adoption Creates Digital Vulnerabilities and Economic Inequality

The shift to IPv6 has escalated into a matter of national security, as nations lagging in adoption are increasingly exposed to cyber threats and diminished control over their digital infrastructure due to the limited availability of IPv4. With IPv6-only environments becoming more common, reliance on IPv4 may lead to slower connectivity, deepening the digital divide and potentially worsening economic disparities. In this geopolitical landscape, moving to IPv6 serves as a critical step toward maintaining digital independence. more

IDN Spoofing Solutions With Balance

Last week's tizzy about IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) spoofing was an interesting exercise in watching how people react to the unknown. The nearly-universal response to the problem that had been described in detail many years ago was "turn off IDNs" instead of "assume that the people who created IDNs knew about this, so let's do some research." The following is based on my thoughts this week. For those of you who are not familiar with my earlier work, I'm one of the authors of the IDN standards... more

Blacklisting Under Wrong Assumptions

If you analyze the relay of spam- and malware-containing email circulating on the Internet purely through your mail server logs (running the Unix command "tail"), a large proportion seem to come from Asia Pacific hosts, especially those from mainland China. Therefore, many less-experienced systems administrators have simply blocked the access from subnets of Chinese or Asian origin, effectively destroying the fabric of the Internet -- messaging. If administrators took pains to analyze these supposedly Asian spam messages by analyzing the full Internet headers, they would have realized that the Asian servers were merely used by the real spammers as open relays, or perhaps as zombie hosts previously infected with the mass mailing worms through the exploitation of operating system vulnerabilities.  more

Lessons for the Internet Governance Forum from the IETF

As Antonios Broumas has correctly observed, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) begins life in Athens next week without the means for its participants to agree upon any substantive documents such as resolutions or declarations. Indeed, according to Nitin Desai, the Chairman of its Advisory Group, it is impossible for the IGF to make any decisions, as it "is not a decision-making body. We have no members so we have no power to make decision."... more

Network Protocols and Their Use

In June, I participated in a workshop, organized by the Internet Architecture Board, on the topic of protocol design and effect, looking at the differences between initial design expectations and deployment realities. These are my impressions of the discussions that took place at this workshop. ... In this first part of my report, I'll report on the case studies of two protocol efforts and their expectations and deployment experience. more

How Do You Do Secure Bank Transactions on the Internet?

Banks love it when their customers do their transactions on line, since it is so much cheaper than when they use a bank-provided ATM, a phone call center, or, perish forbid, a live human teller. Customers like it too, since bank web sites are usually open 24/7, there's no line and no need to find a parking place. Unfortunately, crooks like on line banking too, since it offers the possibility of stealing lots of money. How can banks make their on line transactions more secure? more

History of SMTP

The following excerpt is from the Free Software Magazine, March 2005 Issue, written by Kirk Strauser. To read the entire article, you may download the magazine here [PDF]. Also thanks to Yakov Shafranovich for making us aware of this publication. "Spam has existed since at least 1978, when an eager DEC sales representative sent an announcement of a product demonstration to a couple hundred recipients. The resulting outcry was sufficient to dissuade most users from repeating the experiment. This changed in the late 1990s: millions of individuals discovered the internet and signed up for inexpensive personal accounts and advertisers found a large and willing audience in this new medium." more

Should a Domain Name Registrar Run from a PO Box?

In 2008 KnujOn published a report indicating that 70 ICANN accredited Registrars had no publicly disclosed business location. The fundamental problem was one of community trust and consumer faith. Registrars extend their legitimacy to their domain customers who then transact and communicate with the public. more

ICANN, WSIS and the Making of a Global Civil Society - Part II

This is the second part of a two-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Milton Mueller discussing ICANN, World Summit on the Information Society, and the escalating debates over Internet Governance. Read the first part of this Interview here. Geert Lovink: "Confronted with Internet governance many cyber activists find themselves in a catch 22 situation. On the one hand they do not trust government bureaucrats to run the Internet, out of a justified fear that regulation through multilateral negotiations might lead to censorship and stifle innovation. On the other hand they criticize the corporate agendas of the engineering class that is anything but representative. What models should activists propose in the light of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)? There seems to be no way back to a nation state 'federalist' solution. Should they buy into the 'global civil society' solution?" more

SIEM Alternatives; How Does OpenXDR Make Traditional SIEM Obsolete?

OpenXDR is one of the most cost-effective SIEM alternatives that help businesses detect and mitigate threats within hectic modern architectures. A single cyber incident impacts every aspect of a business -- from system downtime, revenue losses, and reputation damage to disrupted operations. more

IDNs and IE7 and the Coming Storm

If you're brave, today you can finally download the Internet Explorer 7 public beta. Why should you be interested? Not because the browser's wonderful. It isn't -- initial reports are that it's not ready for prime-time. But you might be interested to know that as of today, users of IE will be able to use internationalized domain names (IDNs). ...Many other browsers are already IDN-capable, including Firefox, but most people in the world use Explorer. Think China, Japan, India. Think most of the world's population... Think of millions of new Internet users working in their own language, customers for commercial goods and services. But think also about intellectual property nightmares, think about phishing, think about whether there's one interoperable Internet, or several Internets acting very weird. These issues and others will become big news when people start using IDNs massively -- and with support from Internet Explorer, that's about to happen. more

The Internet is Dead - Long Live the Internet

Back in the early 2000s, several notable Internet researchers were predicting the death of the Internet. Based on the narrative, the Internet infrastructure had not been designed for the scale that was being projected at the time, supposedly leading to fatal security and scalability issues. Yet somehow the Internet industry has always found a way to dodge the bullet at the very last minute. more

.hk the “Most Unsafe” Domains?

Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine's top stories list. But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published. McAfee's study seems to be based on a year's worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk ccTLD. These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards... more

An Open Letter to Yahoo!‘s Postmaster

In June 2004, Yahoo! and a number of other companies got together to announce the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance or ASTA. While it appears to have been largely silent since then, ASTA did at least publish an initial set of best practices the widespread adoption of which could possibly have had some impact on spam... The majority of these are clearly aimed at ISPs and end users, but some are either generally or specifically relevant to email providers such as Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft... The problem: Since February this year, we have been receiving a significant quantity of spam emails from Yahoo!'s servers. In addition to their transport via the Yahoo! network, all originate from email addresses in yahoo.com, yahoo.co.uk and one or two other Yahoo! domains. Every such message bears a Yahoo! DomainKeys signature... more