NASCAR team Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing (CSLFR) disclosed today a ransomware infection incident that took place in April and nearly caused losing access to critical files worth about $2 million. more
Yesterday marked the last day of the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy, but also the culmination of a week where the need for an open and trusted Internet has been the main message from all stakeholders. Back in 2008, the OECD was one of the first intergovernmental organizations to open its discussions to the wider Internet community. more
The ICANN 56 meeting takes place in Helsinki, Finland, from June 27-30 and while it is a smaller "policy forum" style of meeting, there will still be some activities related to DNSSEC, DANE and DNS security in general. DNSSEC Workshop The DNSSEC Workshop will take place on the morning of Monday, 27 June 2016. All times are Eastern European Summer Time (EEST), which is UTC+3. more
The telecoms industry represents one of the most dynamic sectors in the world. Only 25 years ago 90% of all activities took place via telephone calls over fixed telephone lines. Now, within the broader ICT industry, telecoms is underpinning all of the new developments in relation to the digital, sharing and interconnected economies. It facilitates new social and economic developments in all sectors such as e-health, e-education, e-business, smart grids, smart cities, e-government, and so on. more
For some years I hear people discuss that education needs to transform and adapt to the Digital Age. In one way education has: I am told that so called MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, are a huge success. Classes from lecturers at (top) universities are freely available online. But this is traditional education distributed and made accessible in a modern form. The debate ought to focus on education for the jobs and skills of the future. more
One of the most popular top-level domains under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) is not even a gTLD (generic top-level domain). It's a ccTLD: .co, the country-code top-level domain for Colombia, in South America. Based on statistics at WIPO as of this writing, 29 .co domain names have been the subject of UDRP disputes this year, making it the most-disputed ccTLD under the popular domain name dispute policy. more
Monika Ermert reporting in the IP Watch: "On the eve of the third internet-related Ministerial Meeting of the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) starting tomorrow in Cancun, Mexico, the Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG) published a think report on 'One Internet.' Calling for a new 'social compact' for the internet, the 140-page report that was fed by 50 research studies has a number of well-known recommendations, some surprisingly technical and some interesting ones." more
A number of Congressional Republicans today questioned National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for apparent violation of federal law in using federal funds to relinquish U.S. oversight of the Internet. more
This move will allow the company to separate its call routing services for telecom carriers from its marketing and security related services. Additionally the company has indicated that the latter unit, that is marketing, security, and data services, will be rebranded. more
According to a recent report by Akamai, an analysis of massive Account Takeover (ATO) attack campaigns, targeting two of its customers, revealed 1,127,818 different IPs were involved in the attacks. more
While enhancing ICANN's diversity has been agreed on as a principle, previous discussions were often characterized by conflicting views on priorities, dimensions of diversity, or the current levels of diversity. As a new group is about to be formed to enhance ICANN's diversity, the importance of the purpose cannot be underestimated: "Maximum participation and transparent deliberations by all affected stakeholders are necessary in order to capture the diversity of views that constitute the (global) public interest in a given instance". more
The U.S. is unusual in that grievants of a UDRP award have a statutory remedy from an adverse UDRP award, namely an action for declaratory judgement under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). The action is not an appeal, but a de novo assessment of the parties' rights, either that the domain name holder is cybersquatting or its registration was lawful. Under U.S. law UDRP awards are not treated as arbitration awards subject to the Federal Arbitration Act but as new disputes. more
The recent decision taken in the USA makes total sense. It has been ridiculous that the incumbent telecoms operators there could present themselves as ISPs and claim that broadband was a content service rather than telecoms infrastructure - by doing this successfully for 20 years, they have not been subject to a range of telecoms regulations. This in turn has stifled competition, innovation, good quality customer services and the development of fibre optic networks in the USA. more
Total number of Business Email Compromise (BEC) related crimes have reached epidemic levels, at nearly $3.1 billion in losses and involving 22,143 victims worldwide since January 2015, according to a new FBI report. more
The 47 year old Las Vegas man known as the "Spam King" has been sentenced to 2.5 years in federal prison for sending over half-million spam messages to Facebook users resulting in over 27 million spam messages sent through social networking company's servers. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of fraud. more