Cybersecurity

Neelie Kroes, the EU, Cloud Computing, Regulation and Good Ears

In her blog EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes blogs on her stance on cloud computing. In short: this is a good development which the EU will embrace and advocate, but may need regulation in order to ensure a safe environment for industry and individuals in the cloud. Here's some thoughts on that. more

DNSSEC Deployment Reaching Critical Mass

Less than nine months after the DNS root was signed, the rollout of DNSSEC across the Internet's top-level domains is approaching the tipping point. Thanks to the combined efforts of registries around the world, the new security protocol will soon be available to the majority of domain name registrants in almost a quarter of all TLDs. more

Making IDN gTLDs Attractive and Safe

The primary focus of this article is to illustrate that the Applicant Guidebook is not supplying sufficient protection mechanisms, and creates too high financial barrier for those who are interested in applying for multiple Top-Level Domains (TLDs) that are translations/transliterations of each other and/or of an existing generic Top-Level Domains (tt-gTLDs). more

Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government

An unprecedented cyberattack on the Canadian government also targeted Defence Research and Development Canada, making it the third key department compromised by hackers, CBC News has learned. ... While there is no definitive proof, of course, that China was behind these attacks, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. China (allegedly) has a long history of engaging in espionage activities in order to gain access to information. In the United States, this is sometimes referred to as cyber warfare, but I think that cyber espionage is a better choice of terms. more

At the ARIN Meeting

I have been attending the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) meeting in Toronto. ARIN is one of the RIRs, i.e., the Internet address registry and policy making authority for North America. Although I have observed and participated on RIR lists for some time and interacted with RIR representatives at ICANN, WSIS and IGF, this is the first time I have been able to attend a meeting. I'm glad I did. more

Are We at the Dawn of a New Cold War?

Over the past say six months there are trends and events on and around the Internet that made me come up with this bizarre sounding question. Still it may actually make sense if we look at some facts. I'll be honest up front. This is a contribution that is not totally thought over and more a compilation of ideas and impressions gathered over the past weeks and months. Still, it could well serve as the beginning of a discussion on giving the recent events a place. There's nothing better than a provocative question in that case! Let's start here. more

The Dark Internet

I consult on communication issues for Neustar, an Internet infrastructure company. As most CircleIDers know, Neustar works behind the scenes to ensure the smooth operation of many critical systems like DNS, .us and .biz, local number portability and digital rights management. One of the cool things about working for them is the chance to attend the events they sponsor. Last week Neustar held a security briefing for senior federal IT personnel focused on Cybersecurity and Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC)... 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

Where Every Phisher Knows Your Name

Spear phishing is the unholy love child of email spam and social engineering. It refers to when a message is specifically crafted, using either public or previously stolen information, to fool the recipient into believing that it's legitimate. This personalization is usually fairly general, like mentioning the recipient's employer (easily gleaned from their domain name.) Sometimes they address you by name. Much scarier is when they use more deeply personal information stolen from one of your contacts... more

Wikileaks DDoS of Spamhaus: Political Activism at Its Dumbest

A week ago, Paul Vixie wrote a thoughtful piece on the morality of DDos, for both sides of the equation of the Wikileaks issues. In it he summarizes things nicely: "Denial of service is not merely a peaceful protest meant to garner attention for a cause. Denial of service is forcible and it is injurious. It is not like any form of civil disobedience, but rather it is criminal behaviour more like looting." Well said, Paul... more

Who Is Blocking WHOIS? Part 2

We have just returned from the Brussels, Belgium ICANN meeting where we released our Registrar audit, the Internet "Doomsday Book." There are many topics covered in the report, but we wanted to follow up specifically on the issue of WHOIS access and add data to our previous column Who Is Blocking WHOIS? which covered Registrar denial of their contracted obligation to support Port 43 WHOIS access. more

eco: 100K PCs Cleaned Through Anti-Botnet Center

eco, the German ISP association, mentions on its website today that the 100,000^th PC was cleaned from infection through its PC cleaning program. Since 15 September, German account holders could visit the website to download tools to clean up computers from digital infections. Botfrei ("botfree", translation WdN) is a cooperation between eco and the German government. First figures seem to prove that this is a successful public-private partnership, worth looking into for other countries as a best practice. more

Ensuring Maximum Resilience to the DNS?

Yesterday CommunityDNS noticed a sudden, heavy spike in traffic through its Anycast node in Hong Kong. While comfortably processing queries at 863,000 queries per second for close to 2 hours the occurrence was undeniable. While we can't say the increase in traffic was specifically due to DDoS, its sudden increase is suspicious and reminds us that DDoS is still a popular tool used by the malicious community. more

Cyber Crime: It’s All About Data (Part 1)

Cyber crime = crime. How do we make police forces understand this and how to get it prioritized? In this series of blogs I am looking into whether aggregating data can change the way cyber crime is approached and prioritized. At a seminar at the IT Security trade fair in Utrecht detective super intendant Charlie McMurdie, head of the cyber crime unit of the London Metropolitan police, said that cyber crime was recently prioritized by the UK government. She also said the following and I'm allowed to quote this... more

.COM - The Riskiest Top-Level Domain? (Part 2)

Following up from my post yesterday, I thought I would take a look at how spammy each particular TLD is. At the moment, I only track 8 TLD's - .cn, .ru, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .name. To check to see which one is the spammiest, I took all of our post-IP blocked mail and determined how many times those messages occurred in email, and how many times that email was marked as spam... more