Threat Intelligence

Why Do We Accept $10 Security on $1,000,000 Data?

Last week we heard of yet another egregious security breach at an online provider, as crooks made off with the names, address, and birth dates of eBay users, along with encrypted passwords. They suggest you change your password, which is likely a good idea, and you better also change every other place you used the same password. But that's not much help since you can't change your name, address, and birth date, which are ever so handy for phishing and identity theft.

Recommendations for Adding Cybersecurity Intelligence to the Smart Grid

Over the last few years, there has been an increased effort to modernize the U.S. electric grid. Building a "Smart Grid" has been central in the effort to help utilities better manage their resources, minimize power outages and reduce energy consumption. However, adding more electronic devices and sensors to the grid's network has made it a prime target of cyberattacks, like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which if successful, could cause wide-spread disruption of services affecting many other sectors.

The Real Uneven Playing Field of Name Collisions

Recent comments on the name collisions issue in the new gTLD program raise a question about the differences between established and new gTLDs with respect to name collisions, and whether they're on an even playing field with one another. Verisign's latest public comments on ICANN's "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions" Phase One Report, in answering the question, suggest that the playing field the industry should be concerned about is actually in a different place. The following points are excerpted from the comments submitted April 21.

Wow! BIND9 9.10 Is out, and What a List of Features!

Today the e-mail faerie brought news of the release of BIND9 9.10.0 which can be downloaded from here. BIND9 is the most popular name server on the Internet and has been ever since taking that title away from BIND8 which had a few years earlier taken it from BIND4. I used to work on BIND, and I founded ISC, the home of BIND, and even though I left ISC in July 2013 to launch a commercial security startup company, I remain a fan of both ISC and BIND.

Overcoming Cloud Storage Security Concerns: 7 Key Steps

According to a 2013 TwinStrata survey, 46 percent of organizations use cloud storage services and 38 percent plan to adopt this technology in the near future. Cloud storage capacity demands are increasing 40 to 60 percent year-over-year, while storage density lags behind at 20 percent. The result? More data, growing demands for space and increasing security concerns. How do enterprises overcome cloud storage security challenges?

Doing Crypto

The recent discovery of the goto fail and heartbleed bugs has prompted some public discussion on a very important topic: what advice should cryptologists give to implementors who need to use crypto? What should they do? There are three parts to the answer: don't invent things; use ordinary care; and take special care around crypto code.

Verisign’s Preliminary Comments on ICANN’s Name Collisions Phase One Report

Verisign posted preliminary public comments on the "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions" Phase One Report released by ICANN earlier this month. JAS Global Advisors, authors of the report contracted by ICANN, have done solid work putting together a set of recommendations to address the name collisions problem, which is not an easy one, given the uncertainty for how installed systems actually interact with the global DNS. However, there is still much work to be done. I have outlined the four main observations...

Blocking Amplification Attacks: Sometimes the Incentives Work Against You

Since the end of last year, amplification attacks have been increasingly used by attackers and received heavy media coverage. Everyday protocols not given much thought before, like Network Time Protocol (NTP), can be asked in a very short remote command to send a very large response (list of 600 clients last connected to the NTP server) to a spoofed IP address (the target) by the requestor/attacker.

Open Source Software Is the Worst Kind Except for All of the Others

Heartbleed, for anyone who doesn't read the papers, is a serious bug in the popular OpenSSL security library. Its effects are particularly bad, because OpenSSL is so popular, used to implement the secure bit of https: secure web sites on many of the most popular web servers such as apache, nginx, and lighttpd. A few people have suggested that the problem is that OpenSSL is open source, and code this important should be left to trained professionals. They're wrong.

Heartbleed: Don’t Panic

There's been a lot of ink and pixels spilled of late over the Heartbleed bug. Yes, it's serious. Yes, it potentially affects almost everyone. Yes, there are some precautions you should take. But there's good news, too: for many people, it's a non-event. Heartbleed allows an attacker to recover a random memory area from a web or email server running certain versions of OpenSSL. The question is what's in that memory. It may be nothing, or it may contain user passwords (this has reportedly been seen on Yahoo's mail service), cryptographic keys, etc.