Phishing Costs Companies over $411 Million per Alert

Phishing blindsides businesses' best defenses and takes a toll whose price tag still hasn't been pinned down. Here's one estimate: $441 million per attack, according to a recent study of the cybercrime's effect on stock market data (market value, volume of shares traded, and stock volatility) of global firms. The authors use "event studies" techniques (i.e., analyzing the impact of specific types of events on companies' market performance) to analyze nearly 2,000 phishing alerts by 259 companies in 32 countries... more

Telcos Cannot Wind Back the Clock

The proposals by the European and Arab telcos that are being considered at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) conference in Dubai later this year are most certainly facing defeat. This is not because the USA believes that the international telecommunications regulations (ITR) cannot be discussed by the ITU. America has a rather strange set of national regulations in which they have combined internet infrastructure and content -- and as such they claim that this no longer has anything to do with telecommunications. more

4G on the Moon

This post is a little more lighthearted than my normal blog posts. An article in FierceWireless caught my eye talking about how Nokia plans to establish a 4G network on the Moon. The primary purpose of the wireless technology will be to communicate between a base station and lunar rovers. 4G LTE is a mature and stable technology that can handle data transmission with ease... more

Charting the Balance between Trademark Owners and Domain Name Holders: A Jurisprudential Overview

Efforts to combat cybersquatting began in earnest in 1998 when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) (at the request of the United States Government supported by all member states) began an extensive process of international consultations "to address cross-border trademark-abusive domain name registrations." ... The extensive process concluded in the Spring of 1999 with WIPO publishing a detailed report... more

Verisign Provides Open Source Implementation of Merkle Tree Ladder Mode

The quantum computing era is coming, and it will change everything about how the world connects online. While quantum computing will yield tremendous benefits, it will also create new risks, so it's essential that we prepare our critical internet infrastructure for what's to come. That's why we're so pleased to share our latest efforts in this area, including technology that we're making available as an open source implementation to help internet operators worldwide prepare. more

Berners-Lee Warns Rise of Dominant Platforms has Resulted in Weaponization of the Web at Scale

The World Wide Web turned 29 today and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, web inventor, has shared some stern warnings about the direction it is headed. more

A History of Holding ICANN to Account

I'm attending only my second ICANN meeting here in Prague since I left the role as Executive Officer and Vice President Corporate Affairs at ICANN in January 2010... Today at the meeting's opening, outgoing President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said that on his first day on the job he was given a 'blank sheet of paper' and told that the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the US Department of Commerce was not going to be renewed by ICANN and "you better come up with something better and you have to get it done in 90 days because the MoU is going to expire." It's great rhetorical flourish but the reality is vastly different. more

DOTCOM Act Passes House as Rubio Leads Senate Call for IANA Oversight Hearings

The Shimkus Amendment to the $601 billion National Defense Authorization Act (HR 4435) passed the House of Representatives on May 22nd by a mostly partisan vote of 245–177. While all 228 Republicans present and voting supported the amendment only 17 Democrats voted "aye", with 177 in opposition. Final passage on the entire bill was a bipartisan vote of 325–98. The Senate has not yet passed its version of a FY 2015 Pentagon funding bill, and once it does all the differences between the two versions must be reconciled before it can be sent to President Obama for his signature. more

Georgians Use Spam to Explain Their Situation

Call it outreach, call it propaganda or call it brilliance or even desperate measures, spammers (people) who favour the Georgian side in the recent conflict have been spamming using email, to get their point across. Depending on where in the world you are from, your ideological standpoint on Russia and your beliefs, when it comes to what email should be like, can be different and you may judge the action as you will. I call it spam. An Estonian colleague Viktor Larionov was quoted saying that whether there is a cyber war in Georgia or not, we know there is in fact a media war in play... more

Amazon Will Thrive After COVID-19

Amazon has already received a retail windfall, but their infrastructure will be more critical in the long run. My final exam this term will include a take-home question: How will COVID-19 affect the fortunes one of the major Internet companies - Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft? I didn't include Amazon because they are an obvious winner. On December 30, 2019 Amazon stock was selling for $1,847.84 per share and on May 1, 2020 it was $2,286.04, a 23.7 percent increase. more

Study Reveals U.S. Carriers Throttle Online Video on Their Mobile Networks Even When Not Congested

A study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst involving 650,000 tests indicates U.S. carriers are throttling online video on their mobile networks regardless of whether or not those networks are congested. more

Global Spam Levels Drop Following Certain Events

If you haven't noticed lately, spam levels around the world have started dropping especially in October after a couple of events occurred. The first is a Russian crackdown on alleged spam king Igor Gusev, thought to be involved in the operations of SpamIt.com. SpamIt mysteriously shut down in late September, perhaps because Gusev caught wind of law enforcement starting to take notice of him. more

The True Faith of Internet Governance: Statism Finds Its Champion

A portion of me sympathizes with Richard Hill. He argues passionately in his recent article, "The True Stakes of Internet Governance" for a statist position on Internet governance. It is hard to be an unheeded prophet; difficult to take positions that are not in the comfortable mainstream of what, as you perceive, are lemmings heading for the cliff. I know the feeling. more

Jeremy Jaynes Gets One More Chance

n 2004 Jaynes became the country's first convicted spam felon under the Virginia anti-spam law. He's been appealing his conviction ever since, most recently losing an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court by a 4-3 decision in February. As I discussed in more detail at the time the key questions were a) whether the Virginia law had First Amendment problems and b) whether Jaynes had standing to challenge it. The court answered No to b), thereby avoiding the need to answer a), the dissent answered Yes to both. more

VoIP in 2008: “I’m Not Dead”

VoIP remains a hot topic in the IP communications world, but it's definitely evolving. The following is my most recent article for a column that I write for TMCnet, and it's a year-end review on VoIP as well as my outlook for how it's changing for 2009. Colleague Alec Saunders posted his response to my article yesterday, and it's a good read. If you're interested in where VoIP is headed, then my article should help keep that dialog moving along within the CircleID community. Here we go... more