The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) has announced that Dave Piscitello, formerly VP of Security at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has joined the CAUCE Board of Directors. more
One of the consequences of the Jan 6th events is a renewed attention towards Surveillance Capitalism as a key doctrine undermining democracy. This 2-part series of articles discusses the emergence, rise, and fall of Surveillance Capitalism under the premise that the better we understand the danger at the door, the better we are able to confront it. more
Monetization of DDoS attacks has been core to online crime way before the term cybercrime was ever coined. For the first half of the Internet's life, DDoS was primarily a mechanism to extort money from targeted organizations. As with just about every Internet threat over time, it has evolved and broadened in scope and objectives. The new report by Forcepoint Security Labs covering their investigation of the Sledgehammer gamification of DDoS attacks is a beautiful example of that evolution. more
In recent interviews about World IPv6 Launch I've been asked by several different people whether or not I think there needs to be some kind of a "Flag Day" on which the world all together switches from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to the version 6 (IPv6). I don't think a flag day is needed. World IPv6 Launch is just the right thing. It's worth looking at some previous flag-type days to get a better sense of why. more
Cybersecurity regulation will take its place alongside environmental regulation, health and safety regulation and financial regulation as a major federal activity. What is not yet clear is what form the regulations will take. FISMA controls, performance standards, consensus standards and industry-specific consortia standards are all possible regulatory approaches. What is not likely is an extended continuation of the current situation in which federal authorities have only limited, informal oversight of private sector cyberdefenses (or lack thereof). more
So this Internet thing, as we discussed in our last article, is broken. I promised to detail some of the specific things that are broken. Implicit trust is the Achilles heel of the Internet... All of the communication between the resolver and the DNS server is in plain text that can be easily seen and changed while in transit, further, the resolver completely trusts the answer that was returned... more
The 2004 criminal spam case against large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, which I've covered in several previous blog entries, appears to have come to an ignominious end with the state supreme court throwing out the law under which he was convicted. The Virginia anti-spam law was one of the first in the country with criminal provisions, but it failed due to the way that First Amendment cases are treated differently from all other cases. more
The fifth generation of wireless cellular networks, "5G", has seen remarkable growth in the last year, reports industry trade organization 5G Americas. more
KnujOn has retrieved a document indicating that the ICANN-Accredited Registrar Abacus America is in Corporate Delinquency in the state of Kansas. Kansas defines a company as Delinquent if "The business entity has not filed its annual report and fee by the due date." ... This incident is significant because Abacus America was cited by LegitScript and KnujOn for sponsoring an unlicensed pharmacy selling Schedule 3 substances... more
In addition to Egypt, Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia which had successfully completed the second phase of the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Fast Track Process earlier this year, ICANN announced today that China, Hong Kong, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Tunisia have also successfully completed the second phase. more
In a recent blog post How to Sell IPv6 to Executives -- Guidance for Engineers, the feedback I got from mailing list discussions was that the case for IPv6 was more of mitigating risk than some inherent benefit of IPv6 itself. That is quite true depending on context. In this article, I will attempt to give more insight into the benefits of deploying IPv6. In a nutshell, viewed from the traditional lens of benefit as something we know and recognise based upon experience, IPv6 has little benefit apart from the large address space. more
In a significant escalation against piracy, a French court has ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to tamper with their DNS resolvers to block access to approximately 117 pirate sports streaming domains. more
On October 28th, at a Special Meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors, an updated New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) timeline was adopted as a working plan. The new Launch Scenario indicates that the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook will be declared final at the December ICANN Meeting in Cartagena, Colombia. more
As the saying goes, elections have consequences. The consequences are underscored in the recent U.S. Presidential election and the potential impact on the Internet, infrastructure and cybersecurity. In the context of the CircleID global community, it seems worth asking where things are headed? It does beg for an analysis of what is actually proposed in Presidential Transition Project 2025 related to things internet and cybersecurity. more
Each year in December, I sit down and take a moment to reflect on how the .brands space has progressed in the previous 12 months. Most folks will understand that starting a movement to create the next evolution of the internet with 'digital superbrands' was a little slow at first. Slowly but surely, that has started to change and especially in 2016, it really felt like people were starting to 'get it' -- both in terms of brands themselves, and the media and consumers. more