Cybersecurity

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

I have long been intrigued by the question of how do we turn the internet into a lifeline grade infrastructure... My hope that this will occur soon or even within decades is diminishing. Most of us observe, almost daily, how even well established infrastructures tend to crumble when stressed, even slightly... I was at the O'Reilly Etel conference last week. The content was impressive and the people there were frequently the primary actors in the creation and deployment of VOIP. However, not once during the three days did I hear a serious discussion by a speaker or in the hallways about how this evolving system would be managed, monitored, diagnosed, or repaired. more

IPv6 Security Myth #6: IPv6 is Too New to be Attacked

Here we are, half-way through this list of the top 10 IPv6 security myths! Welcome to myth #6. Since IPv6 is just now being deployed at any real scale on true production networks, some may think that the attackers have yet to catch up. As we learned in Myth #2, IPv6 was actually designed starting 15-20 years ago. While it didn't see widespread commercial adoption until the last several years, there has been plenty of time to develop at least a couple suites of test/attack tools. more

Identity Theft of Root Name Servers, Reason Unknown

There have been a number of attacks on the root name servers over the years, and much written on the topic. (A few references are here, here and here.) Even if you don't know exactly what these servers do, you can't help but figure they're important when the US government says it is prepared to launch a military counterattack in response to cyber-attacks on them. more

U.S. Critical Infrastructure Will Be Attacked Within 2 Years, According to 2017 Black Hat Survey

According to a 2017 Black Hat Attendee Survey, cyberattacks on U.S. enterprise and critical infrastructure are coming soon, and in most cases defenders are not prepared. more

IPv6 Security Myth #7: 96 More Bits, No Magic

This week's myth is interesting because if we weren't talking security it wouldn't be a myth. Say what? The phrase "96 more bits, no magic" is basically a way of saying that IPv6 is just like IPv4, with longer addresses. From a pure routing and switching perspective, this is quite accurate. OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP all work pretty much the same, regardless of address family. Nothing about finding best paths and forwarding packets changes all that much from IPv4 to IPv6. more

Think China Is the Highest Spamming Country? Think Again

In my department, we block about 92% of our total email (around 2.5 billion per day) at the network edge without accepting the message. When we do that, we don't see any traffic from that IP anymore and don't keep stats on it due to the overwhelming volume of mail. However, we do keep stats on mail that we block with our content filter. I decided to go and calculate how much spam we receive from each country by mapping the source IP back to its source country... more

Gmail as an Email Honeypot

You all remember cybersquatting, a popular sport in the late 90s, right? McDonalds.com, JenniferLopez.com, Hertz.com and Avon.com thankfully all point to the right web sites today, but thaiairline.com, mcdonald.com, luftansa.com, gugle.com, barnesandnobles.com and other misspellings are fake web sites intended to trap the casual surfer with a hand that's a bit too much quicker than the eye... If you want to go to the McDonalds web site, you don't even spend the 10 seconds to look it up -- you will type McDonalds.com and expect to see the latest dollar meal menu. But the same is true for the other popular form of communication -- email... more

Why Foldering Adds Very Little Security

I keep hearing stories of people using "foldering" for covert communications. Foldering is the process of composing a message for another party, but instead of sending it as an email, you leave it in the Drafts folder. The other party then logs in to the same email account and reads the message; they can then reply via the same technique. Foldering has been used for a long time, most famously by then-CIA director David Petraeus and his biographer/lover Paula Broadwell. Why is foldering used? more

2010 Domain Name Year in Review - Oh, What A Year It Was!

Many of us were expecting radical changes in 2010 to the domain name market. There definitely were some of those -- just not the ones I expected. From the seizure of domains names by the US Government to ICANN's removal of restrictions on Registry/Registrar cross-ownership, 2010 was a year full of surprises. In this post, I've compiled what I think were the biggest domain name stories in 2010. more

IETF 85 Begins Next Week In Atlanta - Here Is How To Follow Along

The 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) begins next week in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Over 1000 engineers, maybe as many as 1400 or more, from all around the world will gather in various working groups to discuss and debate issues relating to the open standards that define the Internet's infrastructure. more

Alignment of Interests in DNS Blocking

I've written recently about a general purpose method called DNS Response Policy Zones (DNS RPZ) for publishing and consuming DNS reputation data to enable a market between security companies who can do the research necessary to find out where the Internet's bad stuff is and network operators who don't want their users to be victims of that bad stuff... During an extensive walking tour of the US Capitol last week to discuss a technical whitepaper with members of both parties and both houses of the legislature, I was asked several times why the DNS RPZ technology would not work for implementing something like PROTECT-IP. more

No One is Immune: Qatar Crisis Started by a Targeted Poli-Cyber Attack

The Qatar Crisis started with a targeted Poli-Cyber hack of an unprecedented nature. Its shockwaves and repercussions continue to alter political and business fortunes, directions and paradigms not only in the Gulf region but globally. Almost everyone around the world is now aware of the this crisis that started early June. By mid July a Washington Post report cited US intelligence officials that the UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites, sparking regional upheaval that started it all. more

Verisign Provides Open Source Implementation of Merkle Tree Ladder Mode

The quantum computing era is coming, and it will change everything about how the world connects online. While quantum computing will yield tremendous benefits, it will also create new risks, so it's essential that we prepare our critical internet infrastructure for what's to come. That's why we're so pleased to share our latest efforts in this area, including technology that we're making available as an open source implementation to help internet operators worldwide prepare. more

Swedish Regulator Bans Inclusion of Letters “b”, “a”, “n”, “k” in Domain Names Under .SE

Swedish Regulator PTS have today notified .SE, the Swedish (.SE) TLD registry that they have to change the rules... In short, the decision implies that any form of the sequence of the characters "b", "a", "n", "k" are illegal in domain names in Sweden. Further that checks of what domain names are registered are to be checked before registration. more

Deloitte: DDoS Attacks to Enter Terabit Era in 2017

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent, says Deloitte in its annual Global Predictions report. more