The Recent DDoS Attacks on Banks: 7 Key Lessons

Starting in mid-September, one of the largest and most sophisticated DDoS attacks ever targeted the titans of American banking. Initially, victims included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, and U.S. Bancorp. In the weeks to come, others would also feel the pain. Websites crashed, customers were unable to make transactions and IT professionals and PR gurus went into panic mode. Leon Panetta, U.S. Secretary of Defense, said the attacks foreshadowed a "Cyber Pearl Harbor." more

RIM’s Secret Weapon

The US analyst community has been holding a wake for RIM in the last few days... It's a pile-on that has driven the stock price down from the upper fifties to the mid forties in the last month. And yeah, RIM's stock price is going to suffer in the short term, not just because of these analyst reports, but because their existing software technology is long-in-the-tooth, to put it politely... I wouldn't count them out, though. RIM's secret weapon is the man I nearly bumped into last week... more

The Network of Probabilities

At eComm, I interviewed on stage Neil Davies, founder of Predictable Network Solutions. (Disclosure: they are a consulting client, we are working together to commercialise their technology.) The transcript of the interview is up on the eComm blog, titled The Internet is Not a Pipe and Bandwidth is Bad. Neil's achievement is a breakthrough advance in the use of applied mathematics to describe behaviours of statistically multiplexed networks. more

Satellite Internet Service Progress by SpaceX and Telesat

This has been a busy week in the race to deploy constellations of low-earth orbit (LEO) Internet-service satellites. In their quarterly report, Telesat mentioned progress in two, disparate markets. As I noted earlier, they have signed their first LEO customer - Omniaccess a provider of connectivity to the superyacht market. more

Countdown to IANA Transition Is Not the Countdown to Doomsday

I've mentioned the IANA transition in several posts over the last year or so. Personally I'd love to not have to mention it ever again, as it's not the kind of topic that we should be spending too much time thinking about or worrying about. There are plenty of other things out there that cause us all headaches without adding to the list. However the IANA transition is a topic that is of fundamental importance for the global internet community. more

Megaupload Domains Seized by FBI Now Link to Scam Ads and Malware Due to Renewal Failure

Sean Gallagher reporting in Ars writes: "Earlier this week, something suspicious started happening with Web addresses related to sites seized by the FBI from Megaupload and a number of online gambling sites." more

What’s With the 32-Bit Numbers That the Internet Keeps Defying?

By now you might have read the news "How 'Gangnam Style' Broke YouTube?" What happened is that a YouTube video named 'Gangnam Style' by a South Korean singer Park Jae-sang, known by his stage name PSY, has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube's view counter. YouTube's view counter is built on a 32-bit integer, which provides a view-tracking capability of nearly 2.15 billion views. more

Spam Now Over 90% of All Email, Increasing Volumes Involve Social Networking Sites

Spam levels have increased by 5.1% since last month, reaching heights of 90.4%, according to latest report from Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence... The majority of this increase in spam in May was comprised of messages with very little content other than a subject line and valid hyperlink, says the report. "Each hyperlink pointed to a different active profile on one of a number of major social networking environments. The profiles were likely created using random names and automated CAPTCHA-breaking tools. Moreover, the emails were sent from valid webmail hosting providers, which means they were not spoofed, as has been the case in the past for these types of domains." more

Live On Monday, 25 June - DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN 62 in Panama

With the DNSSEC Root Key Rollover coming up on October 11, how prepared are we as an industry? What kind of data can we collect in preparation? What is the cost-benefit (or not) of implementing DANE? What can we learn from an existing rollover of a cryptographic algorithm? All those questions and more will be discussed at the DNSSEC Workshop at the ICANN 62 meeting in Panama City, Panama, on Monday, June 25, 2018. more

BT Announces 500Mbps to 1000Mbps Broadband Rollout to UK Homes

British Telecom has announced its plan to transform the UK broadband landscape from superfast to ultrafast. The company says it plans to deliver much faster broadband for homes and small businesses via a widespread deployment of “G.fast” -- a technology the company will test in two pilot locations starting this Summer. G.fast is aimed to help BT deliver ultrafast speeds of up to 500Mbps to most of the UK within a decade. Deployment will start in 2016–2017, subject to the pilots being successful, BT says. more

DNSSEC Signed ROOT by 1 July 2010

Mehmet Akcin writes: As announced today as part of RIPE meeting in Lisbon, Portugal by Joe Abley, DNS Group Director at ICANN, and Matt Larson, Vice President of DNS Research at VeriSign, in their presentation (Page 25), DNSSEC for the root zone is proposed to be fully deployed by July 1, 2010. The Draft Timeline suggests Root zone being signed by December 1, 2009 while initially staying internal to ICANN and VeriSign. The incremental roll out of the signed root would then take place from January until July 2010. more

Who Makes the Any Apps Any Handset Call?

The Wall Street Journal today reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to reject a Petition for Declaratory Ruling filed by Skype that would establish a wireless Carterfone policy, i.e., that wireless carriers must allow subscribers to use any compatible handset to access any application, content or software. Chairman Martin has confidence that the marketplace solutions obviate any necessary FCC intervention. Such optimism must derive in part from the apparently newfound willingness of one major wireless carrier, Verizon, to support aspects of open access. Perhaps Chairman Martin has confidence in the marketplace based on the magnanimous offer of most wireless carriers to pro-rate their early termination penalties by $5 a month. But here's the rub... more

An Update From CIRA on IoT Security

Last April, I shared information about a multistakeholder process that CIRA is part of, which seeks to identify and guide the development of policy around the Internet of Things (IoT), putting security at the heart of internet innovations in Canada. Since the formation of this process, we've made quite a bit of progress and I'm pleased to share some of that with you. more

Growing Interest Abroad for Cloud-Based Email Infrastructure

Between September of 2015 and May 2016, (last 8 months) Port25 saw almost a 30 percent jump in new cloud-based email infrastructure interest outside the United States... While most of the influential senders are not abandoning on-premises mail transfer agent (MTA) solutions, many are looking to cloud infrastructure for managing higher-volumes by bifurcating individual email streams to the cloud. more

What Google Sees While Processing 2 Billion Enterprise Emails Per Day

While the news will not be terribly surprising to CircleID readers, Google's latest report on the status of spam and 2009 predictions posted today, might be of particular interest due to the company's shear email processing volume at 2 billion enterprise email connections per day (drawn from company owned Postini Message Security network)... more