Microsoft, Fortra, and Health-ISAC Take Legal Action Against the Abuse of Cobalt Strike to Combat Ransomware Attacks

A group of companies, including Microsoft, have collaborated to launch a major action to disrupt the use of cracked, legacy copies of the security tool Cobalt Strike which cybercriminals have abused to deploy ransomware. more

Department of Commerce to Allow US Companies Work With Chinese to Develop 5G and Other Standards

A new rule announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Monday enables American companies to contribute to standards-development activities in the telecommunications sector more fully. more

Vint Cerf Has Tested Positive for Coronavirus

Internet pioneer and vice president of research at Google, Vint Cerf, said in a tweet this morning that he has tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19). more

Brand Owners, Representatives of WIPO and ICANN Discuss New gTLD Concerns

Managing Intellectual Property, in association with Finnegan, has released an article based on a recently hosted discussion regarding ICANN's approved plans to open the domain name system to an unlimited number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and how the Implementation Recommendation Team's (IRT) recommendation will affect brand owners. Topics included the main concerns with new gTLDs from a brand owner's perspective, the role of IRT, enforcement issues, and navigating the new domain name space. Finnegan partners David Kelly and Jonathan Gelchinsky participated with J Scott Evans of Yahoo! Inc., Elisabeth Roth Escobar of Marriott International, Inc., Erik Wilbers of WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, and Kurt Pritz of ICANN for the roundtable. more

Wow, Sanford Wallace Owes a Lot of Money

Last September MySpace sued ur-spammers Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines were for egregious violations of CAN SPAM. Neither responded, so as was widely reported, earlier this week the court granted a default judgement. Since they sent a lot of spam, the statutory damages came to an enormous $235 million. Even for Spamford, that's a lot of money. more

2018 Cybersecurity Venture Capital Investment Reaches Record $5.3B, Nearly Double that of 2016

2018 proved to be an active year for cybersecurity investing, with record highs in dollars invested which included increased average deal size, continued rise of investment outside of the US, a busy M&A;and IPO market. more

Building the Future of Enterprise - Notes from AWS re:Invent 2016

I attended AWS re:Invent 2016 about three or four weeks ago. Being new to both AWS and to re:Invent I was an outsider again, observing with virgin eyes. This means I learned a lot. Hopefully it means I saw things a bit differently than those more fully entrenched in this new community. So while others have long since covered the product announcements and other major news from the event, I'll take this opportunity to touch on some of the things that struck me as descriptive and/or indicative of the greater trends at play here. more

ICANN vs EPAG: ICANN Seeks Appeal Plus Pushes for ECJ Referral

As I predicted ICANN is pursuing its case against EPAG. They're now not only appealing the case to a higher court in Germany but are also trying to get the entire thing referred to the European Court of Justice. In an announcement late last night ICANN made it very clear what their intentions are. While they're pursuing the appeal in the higher court in the German region, which makes sense at some level, it's also very clear that they're not taking "no" for an answer. more

Going Dark: How the Increasingly Dark Network Is Creating Some Pretty Ugly Choices for Site Security Administrators

I'd like to reflect on a presentation by Dr. Paul Vixie at the October 2022 meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) on the topic of the shift to pervasive encryption of application transactions on the Internet today. There is a view out there that any useful public communications medium needs to safeguard the privacy and integrity of the communications that it carries.  more

IPv6 for Mobile Networks: Time to Act Now!

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) serve the largest constituent of connected devices. There are over 4.6B GSM (and its derivatives) subscriptions today. When you add the CDMA family along with technologies with smaller footprints such as WiMax, IDEN to this list, that number tops 5B mark. On the other hand there are only (yes only!) 800M Internet hosts per ISC. Considering such a small percentage of those 5B or so devices are capable of being an Internet host and out of that percentage even a much smaller percentage is connected at a given time, one can understand the sheer potential of explosion in the number of Internet hosts as mobile devices in the next 3-5 years. more

Large BGP Leak by Google Disrupts Internet in Japan

At 03:22 UTC on Friday, 25 August 2017, the Internet experienced the effects of another massive BGP routing leak. This time it was Google who leaked over 160,000 prefixes to Verizon, who in turn accepted these routes and passed them on. Despite the fact that the leak took place in Chicago, Illinois, it had devastating consequences for the internet in Japan, half a world away. Two of Japan's major telecoms (KDDI and NTT's OCN) were severely affected, posting outage notices (KDDI / OCN pictured below). more

WIPO’s Misleading Release

The World Intellectual Property Organization put out a release yesterday trumpeting an eight percent increase in domain name disputes handled by WIPO. In 2008 there were 2329 complaints filed with WIPO, the most ever. WIPO uses the increase to raise questions about the possible increase in the number of available generic top-level domains... more

Latest Wave of Organized Phishing Attacks Beat Two-Factor Authentication

Researchers at Certfa Lab provide a review of the latest wave of organized phishing attacks by Iranian state-backed hackers which succeeded by compromising 2-factor authentication. more

FCC Chairman: We Must Choose to Preserve the Open Internet

As per earlier reports, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules today requiring Internet service providers to treat all Internet traffic equally and allow users to access their networks with any device. more

Multi-Stakeholderism and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’

I was part of a group of about 200 people who attended and update at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali on the Montevideo statement. I'd like to share a few of my observations, and offer some unsolicited advice. First, the de facto leader of the and champion of the multi-stakeholder model, the United States, has been sent to the penalty box in light of the NSA surveillance revelations. more