Cybersecurity

On Comcast and Net Neutrality: Shouting Fire in a Theater

The Comcast traffic shaping case has stirred up passionate debate. Net neutrality proponents are calling for Comcast's head on a platter. The common argument is that Comcast's policy may stifle innovation and competition. If a service provider is allowed to exercise unregulated discretion in how it treats subscriber traffic, it is a slippery slope toward anti-competitive practices. Net neutrality says keep your hands off. Some are preaching net neutrality as if it were an inalienable human right like freedom of speech... more

Has Your ISP Been Hacked? (Growing Concern Over AI-Driven Hacking)

As if we didn't have a long enough list of problems to worry about, Lumen researchers at its Black Lotus Labs recently released a blog that said that it knows of three U.S. ISPs and one in India was hacked this summer. Lumen said the hackers took advantage of flaws in software provided by Versa Networks being used to manage wide-area networks. more

New gTLDs Are Great for Pump-and-Dumps, Phishes and More…

Yesterday, egregious financial truth-tellers (a client of ours at easyDNS) ZeroHedge broke the news that parties unknown, engineered what looks to be a textbook "pump-and-dump" on Twitter's stock by putting up a fake "Bloomberg Financial News" site on the domain bloomberg.market and proceeded to run a story on it about Twitter being acquired. The story spread and shares of Twitter stock promptly spiked on volume, Twitter finishing the day on nearly double the average daily volume. more

The Importance of Understanding Attacker Target Selection

There's a bit of a debate going on about whether the Kaseya attack exploited a 0-day vulnerability. While that's an interesting question when discussing, say, patch management strategies, I think it's less important to understand attackers' thinking than understand their target selection. In a nutshell, the attackers have outmaneuvered defenders for almost 30 years when it comes to target selection. more

Who Will Secure the Internet of Things?

Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to get a better sense of the current state of smart devices that many consumers have begun to install in their homes. To explore this question, we purchased a collection of popular IoT devices, connected them to a laboratory network at CITP, and monitored the traffic that these devices exchanged with the public Internet. more

Bashbleed - A Nasty Reminder Never to Forget Security 101

After the botched burglary at the Watergate Apartments, every scam and scandal that hit the headlines became a 'gate' -- Irangate, Contragate, you name it. The Heartbleed bug is possibly the closest thing to Watergate that this generation of computer security had seen till the past few days -- an exploit in a component that is "just there" -- something you utterly rely on to be there and perform its duties, and give very little thought to how secure (or rather, insecure) it might be. So, fittingly, every such catastrophic bug in an ubiquitous component is now a 'bleed'. more

Examining Real Examples of DNS Abuse: A Summary Overview of the 2nd DNS Abuse Forum

It was not without a little trepidation that I planned the 2nd DNS Abuse Institute Forum to focus on the long-standing and often contentious definitional issues surrounding DNS Abuse. While the risk of getting stuck in the usual entrenched positions was real, it seemed to me that we had an opportunity to provide some clarity and if not change minds, at least provide perspective. more

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

ICANN has posted a request by Afilias for a new registry service in relation to "abusive" domains in dot-info. While in general the proposal is motivated by good intentions, the devil is in the details. While most folks (including myself) probably care very little about the .info TLD, my concern is that any bad implementation in .info might be copied or used as a precedent in other more important TLDs, in particular .com run by VeriSign. more

UK’s National Agencies Release White Paper on Evolving Cyber Crime Ecosystem

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Passwords Are Not Enough: Without Two Factor Authentication Your Business Is At Risk

Passwords are no longer sufficient to maintain an adequate level of security for business critical infrastructure and services. Two-factor authentication should be considered the minimum acceptable level of access control. There have been two types of security stories in the technology news over the last few months that should be of particular concern to system administrators and those responsible for maintaining business network infrastructure. more

Cyber Threats Yes, But Is It Cyber War?

Last night Intelligence Squared and Neustar conducted a fascinating, Oxford style debate on whether the threat of cyber war has been exaggerated. A packed house at the Newseum in Washington, DC heard four cyber heavyweights go toe-to-toe verbally both for and against the proposition that the threat has been exaggerated. more

Russian-Based Kaspersky Lab Planning on Swiss Data Center to Address Russian Exploit Concerns

Leading Moscow-based anti-virus software provider Kaspersky Lab is planning to open a data center in Switzerland to address Western government concerns that Russia exploits its anti-virus software to spy on customers, according to a report from Reuters on Wednesday. more

Garth Bruen Discussing Whois, DNSSEC and Domain Security

NameSmash has interviewed Garth Bruen, Internet security expert and creator of Knujon, on some key issues under discussion during the recent ICANN meetings in San Francisco. Topics include Whois, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) -- issues of critical importance particularly with ICANN's expected roll-out of thousands of new gTLDs in the coming years. more

.XXX is Back on the Radar Screen

The DoC seems to have finally realized it went too far by using ICANN to serve the interests of some conservative groups, as mentioned in a previous post. The new story is now that the ICANN board did not reject the .XXX application as such, but only the agreement negotiated between ICM Registry and the ICANN staff at that time. How subtle these things are... more

Massive Spam and Malware Campaign Following Boston Tragedy

On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing, reports Craig Williams from Cisco. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explosions from the attack. Simultaneously, links to these sites were posted as comments to various blogs. more