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The primary means of authentication on the Internet is the password -- a half-century old, shared secret mechanism that is difficult to use (especially on mobile devices) and has acknowledged security flaws including attacks at scale. Even so, passwords remain the most prevalent form of authentication with efforts to enhance security typically relying on "bolt on" solutions that increase user friction. more
In March 2013, Spamhaus was hit by a significant DDoS attack that made its services unavailable. The attack traffic reportedly peaked at 300Gbps with hundreds of millions of packets hitting network equipment on their way. In Q1 2015, Arbor Networks reported a 334Gbps attack targeting a network operator Asia. In the same quarter they also saw 25 attacks larger than 100Gbps globally. What is really frightening about this is that such attacks were relatively easy to mount. more
Sovereign nations around the globe have clearly defined borders, but as attendees were shown at a UN Conference several years ago, cybercrime is a borderless phenomenon. In 2011 Norton Security released statistics that showed that every 14 seconds an adult is a victim of cybercrime and the numbers are growing. As internet use grows, so does the amount and type of information streaming across the web. This information crosses transnational lines, public and private sectors. more
In my last blog post I shared some of the general security challenges that come with the Internet of Things (IoT). In this post, I will focus on one particular security risk: distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Even before the age of IoT, DDoS attacks have been turning multitudes of computers into botnets, attacking a single target and causing denial of services for the target's users. By "multitudes" we can be talking about thousands or even millions of victim devices. Now add IoT into the equation... more
Shadow IT -- the use of unsanctioned software and services by employees -- is a problem. It's a big one. According to Forbes, 72 percent of executives don't know how many "shadow" apps are being used on their network. Beyond overloading network resources and impacting data compliance, there is also the real threat of security breaches from unapproved apps. Managing IT you can't see is no easy task, but fortunately it's not impossible. Here are five tips to help bring light to the shadows. more
Over the last few years I've been hearing some people claim that botnets are the real spam problem and that if you can find a sender then they're not a problem. Much of this is said in the context of hating on Canada for passing a law that requires senders actually get permission before sending email. Botnets are a problem online. They're a problem in a lot of ways. They can be used for denial of service attacks. They can be used to mine bitcoins... more
Unlike consultant-led penetration testing, periodic or continual vulnerability scanning programs have to operate harmoniously with a corporation's perimeter defenses. Firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, web proxies, dynamic malware analysis systems, and even content delivery networks, are deployed to protect against the continuous probes and exploit attempts of remote adversaries -- yet they need to ignore (or at least not escalate) similar probes and tests being launched by the managed security service providers an organization has employed to identify and alert upon any new vulnerabilities within the infrastructure or applications that are to be protected. more
Yesterday, egregious financial truth-tellers (a client of ours at easyDNS) ZeroHedge broke the news that parties unknown, engineered what looks to be a textbook "pump-and-dump" on Twitter's stock by putting up a fake "Bloomberg Financial News" site on the domain bloomberg.market and proceeded to run a story on it about Twitter being acquired. The story spread and shares of Twitter stock promptly spiked on volume, Twitter finishing the day on nearly double the average daily volume. more
The indicators of compromise (IOCs) outlined in my last blog post can be used as a baseline for developing intrusion sets and tracking attack campaigns and threat actors. When launching an attack, threat actors use a variety of vectors and infrastructure, which Verisign iDefense analysts -- as well as analysts across the cybersecurity community -- correlate to group attacks, tracking actors and determining attack methods. more
To those of us who have worked on crypto policy, the 1990s have become known as the Crypto Wars. The US government tried hard to control civilian use of cryptography. They tried to discourage academic research, restricted exports of cryptographic software, and -- most memorably -- pushed something called "escrowed encryption", a scheme wherein the government would have access to the short-term keys used to encrypt communications or stored files. more
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