Cybersecurity

.COM - The Riskiest Top-Level Domain?

A couple of weeks ago, NetworkWorld published an article indicating that the .com TLD was the riskiest TLD in terms of containing code that can steal passwords or take advantage of browser vulnerabilities to distribute malware... It is unclear to me what they mean by TLD's being risky. The number of domains, 31.3% of .com's being considered risky, what does this actually mean? Is it that 31% of .com's are actually serving up malware or something similar? If so, that seems like a lot because for many of us, nearly 1 in every 3 pages that most people visit would be insecure... more

Kidnapping, Theft and Rape Are Not “Cyber” Crimes

Kidnap. Rape. There are no lesser words that can be used to describe what happened to the daughter of an anti-spam investigator in Russia. His daughter was recently released, according to Joseph Menn's recent article on Boing Boin, after having been kidnapped from her home five years ago, fed drugs, and made to service men, as a warning to ward off further investigations. The criminals behind these vicious acts were also responsible for large spamming organization associated with Russian Mob activity. more

Landing Sites, Internet’s Achilles Heel of the Internet?

For a student final dissertation TV documentary short, 10 minutes, I have ended up choosing to investigate whether the landing stations for trans-atlantic cables are the achilles heel of the internet. As an outsider to the world of internet infrastructure I have been struck by how easy it has been to identify the landing stations in Cornwall and the cables that enter them. (Thank you Google for the aerial photographs) more

“Practice Safe DNS” Campaign Launched to Educate on Securing DNS, Adopting DNSSEC

.ORG, The Public Interest Registry (PIR) has announced today the launch of a new campaign aimed at educating IT professionals about securing DNS and the adoption of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The key purpose of the "Practice Safe DNS" website, according to PIR, is to "serve as a key resource for domain holders, registrars, web developers and IT professionals to learn how they can respectively play a increasingly relevant role in providing a safer and more secure Internet." more

The Militarization of the Internet

Someone needs to take a good hard look at those Internet surveillance stories being strategically placed on the front page of the New York Times. There's a trail here, I believe, that's worth following. Here are some data points... there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity reports for the National Research Council.
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United States Is the Most Bot-Infected Country. Right?

A couple of days ago, Threatpost posted an article indicating that the United States is the most bot-infected country... I think that Microsoft's mechanism of measuring bot infections is a good one, not necessarily because it is the most accurate but because it represents the most complete snapshot of botnet statistics. Because Microsoft Windows is installed on so many computers worldwide and because so many users across the world call home to the MSRT, Microsoft is able to collect a very large snapshot of data. 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

Policy Failure Enables Mass Malware: Part II (ICANN and OnlineNIC)

On Wednesday September 29th at 1PM there will be a meeting in the Old Executive Building in Washington D.C. with Registries and domain Registrars to discuss illegal Internet sales of prescription drugs. ICANN was originally invited but declined because citing "inappropriateness" . One "U.S." Registrar who definitely will not be in attendance is OnlineNIC more

Precrime Regulation of Internet Innovation

In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, a 'precrime' police unit relies on the visions of psychics to predict future crimes, then arrests the potential perpetrators before they do anything wrong. In the world of Internet governance, the future is now, as regulators want online services to predict and prevent safety threats before they actually occur. more

Policy Failure Enables Mass Malware: Part I (Rx-Partners/VIPMEDS)

This is the first in a series of releases that tie extensive code injection campaigns directly to policy failures within the Internet architecture. In this report we detail a PHP injection found on dozens of university and non-profit websites which redirected visitor's browsers to illicit pharmacies controlled by the VIPMEDS/Rx-Partners affiliate network. This is not a unique problem, however the pharmacy shop sites in question: HEALTHCUBE[DOT]US and GETPILLS[DOT]US should not even exist under the .US Nexus Policy. more

DNS Clients Do Request DNSSEC Today

After the DNS root zone was finally signed and a number of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) began signing their zones, we were curious to see how many clients actually request DNSSEC information. We looked at the RIPE NCC server that provides secondary service to several country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). more

House of Cards

Time flies. Although it was over 18 months ago, it seems just like yesterday that a small Czech provider, SuproNet, caused global Internet mayhem by making a perfectly valid (but extremely long) routing announcement. Since Internet routing is trust-based, within seconds every router in the world saw this announcement and tried to pass it on. Unfortunately, due to the size of this single message, quite a few routers choked -- resulting in widespread Internet instability. Today, over a year later, we were treated to a somewhat different version of the exact same story. more

Russian Cybercrime is Organized / Russian Cybercrime is Not Organized

The more I read, the more I see conflicting views on the state of the criminal cybercrime world. On the one hand, the Russian criminal cybercrime underworld is a scary, organized place... On the other hand, there is the position that that position is an exaggeration of what it is actually like and that it's a bunch of ragtag folks who have some advanced computer skills but they are not formally organized. ... I see this very similarly to how I see cyber warfare... more

An Attack on DNS is an Attack on the Internet

On Saturday Aug 7th, DNS provider DNS Made Easy was the target of a very large denial of service attack. As far as can be determined the total traffic volume exceeded 40 Gigabit/second, enough to saturate 1 million dialup Internet lines. Several of DNS Made Easy's upstream providers had saturated backbone links themselves. There are indications that not only DNS Made Easy suffered from this attack, but the Internet as a whole. more

First Leap to Secure Linguistic Internet - Arabic SSL Certificates Launched

Linguistic Internet is becoming stronger with the first leap to develop non-Latin applications, as Arabic Language SSL Certificates has been launched by M/s ArabicSSL with the support of Live Multilingual Translator and The Multilingual Internet Group. This step is highly appreciable because this will ensure the security and stability and develop trust over new Internet layers of Internationalized Domains (IDN TLDs). more