Cybersecurity

Bruce Schneier: Government and Industry Have Betrayed the Internet, and Us

Bruce Schneier in an op-ed piece published in the Guardian on Thursday writes: "Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract..."

Dotless Domains Considered Harmful, Says IAB

In light of recent controversies around the implementation of dotless domains, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has released a statement calling the practice harmful. From the executive summary: "It has come to the attention of the IAB that there are proposals for so-called "dotless" domains in the root zone, and that some existing top-level domains (TLDs) are already operating in such a mode. TLD operators of dotless domains are intending that single label names -- those containing no dots -- resolve to the TLD itself, rather than be resolved locally, within the context of the local site at which the user resides."

Renowned Security Expert Bruce Schneier Joins EFF Board of Directors

Schneier's insight is considered particularly important according to EFF, as more and more is learnt "about the unconstitutional surveillance programs from the National Security Agency and the depth and breadth of data the NSA is collecting on the public."

Google Data on State of Web Security

As part of its Transparency Report, Google recently released large amount of data related to unsafe websites. Google groups unsafe websites into two main categories: Malware and Phishing sites.

Arrest Made in Connection to Spamhaus DDoS Case

According to a press release by the Openbaar Ministerie (the Public Prosecution Office), a dutch man with the initials SK has been arrested in Spain for the DDoS attacks on Spamhaus.

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.

U.S. CERT Issues Alert on DNS Amplification Attacks

Neil Schwartzman writes to report that U.S. Cert issued Alert TA13-088A on Friday March 29, 2013. "It is a solid how-to guide to test for, and remediate DNS configurations that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks."

Google Announces DNSSEC Support for Public DNS Service

Google today announced that its "Public DNS" service is now performing DNSSEC validation. Yunhong Gu, Team Lead for Google Public DNS, in post today wrote: "We launched Google Public DNS three years ago to help make the Internet faster and more secure.Today, we are taking a major step towards this security goal: we now fully support DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on our Google Public DNS resolvers."

ICANN Releases Guideline for Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Reporting

ICANN has released a set of guidelines to explain its Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Reporting. The guidelines serve two purposes, says ICANN: "They define the role ICANN will perform in circumstances where vulnerabilities are reported and ICANN determines that the security, stability or resiliency of the DNS is exploited or threatened. The guidelines also explain how a party, described as a reporter, should disclose information on a vulnerability discovered in a system or network operated by ICANN."

DDoS Attacks on US Banks This Week Peaked at 60 Gbps

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that targeted U.S. financial institutions this week have reached 60 Gbps, according to researchers from DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks.

SANS Develops Small-Scale City to Train Cyber Warriors

SANS has announced NetWars CyberCity, a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop. NetWars CyberCity was developed to teach cyber warriors from the U.S. Military how online actions can have kinetic effects.

Latest Makadocs Malware Uses Google Drive Viewer As Proxy to Command and Control Server

Security researchers have found a new variant of the Macadocs malware to be using Google docs as a proxy server and not connecting to a command and control server directly. In a blog post on Friday, Symantec researcher Takashi Katsuki, wrote...

M3AAWG, London Action Plan Release Best Practices to Address Online and Mobile Threats

A cooperative international report was released last week outlining Internet and mobile best practices aimed at curtailing malware, phishing, spyware, bots and other Internet threats. It also provides extensive review of current and emerging threats. "Best Practices to Address Online and Mobile Threats" is a comprehensive assessment of Internet security as it stands today...

FBI Agent Thomas X. Grasso Receives First J.D. Falk Award for Establishing DNS Changer Working Group

Convincing competitors, disparate business entities and researchers to collaborate - many donating their services and resources - to protect millions of end-users worldwide is no small feat. Yet FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas X. Grasso did just that by quietly working behind the scenes to create the DNS Changer Working Group that saved an inestimable number of end-users from losing access to the Web over the last two years.

The Tale of Thousands of Hacked Modems in Brazil, Affecting Millions

Kaspersky Lab Expert, Fabio Assolini, has provided detailed description of an attack which as been underway in Brazil since 2011 using 1 firmware vulnerability, 2 malicious scripts and 40 malicious DNS servers, affecting 6 hardware manufacturers, resulting in millions of Brazilian internet users falling victim to a sustained and silent mass attack on DSL modems.