Cybersecurity

Close to 20% VPN Providers Reported Leaking Customer IP Addresses via WebRTC Bug

Close to 20% of popular VPN services are reported to be leaking customer's IP address via a WebRTC bug known since January 2015, and which "some VPN providers have never heard of." more

DNSSEC vs DDoS Protection: Is It Really a Choice?

Within the last year or two, I've heard people express an opinion to the effect that if the domain name industry put as much focus on preventing distributed denial of service attacks as we have on implementing DNSSEC, the Internet would be a safer place. While there may be a grain of truth there, I suggest that this kind of thinking presents us with something of a false dichotomy. more

Internet Vigilantism

Atrivo (aka Intercage), a Concord, California-based Internet hosting service, disappeared from the Internet for around two days recently. They didn't go bankrupt or suffer a physical catastrophe. Their providers simply shut them down by refusing their traffic. This might very well be the first time in history that the Internet community, a cooperative association of networks with no governing body, has collectively put someone out of business, if only briefly. more

Networks and Nationalization

This post isn't about -- or isn't only about -- the use of computer technology to commit crimes. It's more about the use of computer technology to commit war. A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation about the legal issues cyberwarfare raises. We were talking about various scenarios -- e.g., a hostile nation-state uses cyberspace to attack the U.S. infrastructure by crippling or shutting down a power grid, air traffic control systems, financial system, etc. Mostly, we were focusing on issues that went to the laws of war, such as how and when a nation-state that is the target of a cyberattack can determine the attack is war, rather than cybercrime or cyberterrorism. more

VoIP/IP Telephony in Estonia: Disrupted by Botnets?

With my post earlier this month about the possibility of SIP botnets [also featured here on CircleID], I've had a number of people asking about more information and wondering about the possible impacts. And while I will write more on botnets in general, as far as the potential impact of "botnets" in general, one need only look over at the current situation in Estonia... Now, perhaps Russia is behind the attack... perhaps not. There are obviously much larger political issues going on between the two states. more

Lessons to Be Learned from the Armada Collective’s DDoS Attacks on Greek Banks

'It could've been worse' is a fascinating expression. It implies that the incident in question obviously could have been worse than expected, however it also implies that it could have been better, ultimately leading to the conclusion that it was at least somewhat bad. So both fortunately and unfortunately for three Greek banks, the ransom DDoS attacks levied against them by hacker group the Armada Collective could have been worse. more

Thoughts on the Open Internet - Part 2: The Where and How of “Internet Fragmentation”

In defining what is meant by "Internet Fragmentation" it is useful to briefly describe what is meant by its opposite, an "Open and Coherent Internet". As we've explored in the previous section, "coherence" implies that each of the elements of the Internet are orchestrated to work together to produce a seamless Internet which does not expose the boundaries between discrete elements. more

The Term Web3 Has Been Seized by the Crypto Market: An Internet Governance Perspective

In late 2021, the term Web3 began to increasingly appear in mainstream media outlets. This does not refer, however, to a sudden increase in interest in the Semantic Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee, but rather to something entirely different. Enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) seized this term and changed its meaning to reflect a supposed new stage of the Web, running on top of blockchains and having decentralization as its core value. To summarize the narrative being spun, the first generation of the Web afforded independence to the owners of websites, but this did not extend to the average user... more

Large Open-Source Data Set Released to Help Train Algorithms Spot Malware

For the first time, a large dataset has been released by a security firm to help AI research and training of machine learning models that statically detect malware. more

A Closer Look at Postponing of the Root Zone KSK Rollover Decision

On Sept. 27, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that the first root zone Key Signing Key (KSK) rollover - originally scheduled to take place on Oct. 11 - will be postponed. Although this was certainly a difficult decision, we fully agree that erring on the side of caution is the best approach to take. In this blog post, I want to explain some of the involvement Verisign has had in KSK rollover preparations, as well as some of the recently available research opportunities which generated data that we shared with ICANN related to this decision. more

IP Address Blocking

A network can fence its own IP addresses or block specific external ones from access. Administrators frequently block access to their own IP addresses to bar unwanted access to content. Individual IPs or blocks of IPs may also be blocked due to unwanted or malicious behavior. IP address blocking prevents a specific IP address or group of IP addresses from connecting with a server, computer, or application. more

Introduction: ICANN’s Alternative Path to Delegation (Part 1 of 4)

As widely discussed recently, observed within the ICANN community several years ago, and anticipated in the broader technical community even earlier, the introduction of a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) at the global DNS root could result in name collisions with previously installed systems. Such systems sometimes send queries to the global DNS with domain name suffixes that, under reasonable assumptions at the time the systems were designed, may not have been expected to be delegated as gTLDs. more

Averting the Internet Meltdown

A call to action went out: a small, California-based organization called People for Internet Responsibility (PFIR) posted an announcement for an urgent conference - "Preventing the Internet Meltdown." The meltdown that PFIR envisioned was not an impending technical malfunction or enemy attack. Instead, conference organizers foresaw "risks of imminent disruption" to the Internet that would come from an unlikely sector: government officials and bureaucrats working on the unglamorous-sounding problems of Internet Governance. more

ICANN’s Last Call for Whois Comments

From "Last Call for Whois Comments", a recent opinion piece by eWeek's Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer: "It's not a good sign when the criminals and the lawyers are on the same side of an issue; there may be no good solution to the problems of Whois service rules. Who would have imagined that so much business and so much abuse would center around Internet domain names? Certainly not the designers of the system, including those of the Whois service, which reports on ownership and some other data on domain names... more

NTIA Issues RFC, Asks for Input on Dealing With Botnets and DDoS Attacks

NTIA issued a Request for Comments today asking for broad input from "all interested stakeholders, including private industry, academia, civil society, and other security experts," on actions against botnets and distributed attacks. more