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As I blogged about several months ago, as did numerous other anti-spam bloggers, David Ritz was sued by Jeffrey Reynolds and a judge in North Dakota agreed with Reynolds. At the heart of the case was that Ritz engaged in anti-spam activities using techniques known only to a small subset of advanced computer users, and used these techniques maliciously against Reynolds... Back in the olden days of spam fighting, some anti-spammers used to use malicious techniques against spammers in order to shut them down... more
Admittedly, I'm a not Johnny-come-lately with regards to surveillance, intelligence, telecommunications, network security, law enforcement, and a cross-pollination of all-of-the-above. I actually have a very colorful background of working within all of the aforementioned disciplines - at one time or another - either through the U.S. Military, U.S Government contractors, private industry, etc. ... And unfortunately, I am not generally "shocked" very often by much of the abuses being perpetrated on unwitting Internet users, both by supposedly "trusted" entities (e.g. Democratic Governments, ISPs, etc.) more
The recent research highlighting the alarming practice of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate Authority (CA) vendors using the MD5 hashing algorithm (which was known to be broken since 2005) has shown a major crack in the foundation of the Web. While the latest research has shown that fake SSL certificates with MD5 hashes can be forged to perfection when the CA (such as VeriSign's RapidSSL) uses predictable certificate fields, the bigger problem is that the web has fundamentally botched secure authentication. more
Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most
A report "Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency" has just been released. While I don't agree with everything it says (and in fact I strongly disagree with some parts of it), I regard it as required reading for anyone interested in cybersecurity and public policy. The analysis of the threat environment is, in my opinion, superb; I don't think I've seen it explicated better. Briefly, the US is facing threats at all levels, from individual cybercriminals to actions perpetrated by nation-states. The report pulls no punches... more
According to news reports, part of the EU's cybercrime strategy is "remote search" of suspects' computers. I'm not 100% certain what that means, but likely guesses are alarming. The most obvious interpretation is also the most alarming: that some police officer will have the right and the ability to peruse people's computers from his or her desktop. How, precisely, is this to be done? Will Microsoft and Apple – and Ubuntu and Red Hat and all the BSDs and everyone else who ships systems – have to build back doors into all operating systems? more
At ICANN's meeting in Egypt last week, I had the opportunity to try and explain to various non-technical audiences why the Domain Name System (DNS) is vulnerable to attack, and why that is important, without needing a computer science degree to understand it. Here is the summary. more
Working in the anti-spam and online malware fight can be depressing or at best invoke multiple personality disorder. We all know things are bad on the net, but if you want a dose of stark reality, check out Brian Kreb's fantastic 'Security Fix' blog on the Washington Post site... Speaking to an old friend who asked me what I was doing these days, I recently likened the fight against this relentless onslaught to having one's pinky in a dyke, and there are days when I don't even think we have a dyke! more
The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is soliciting comments on signing the DNSSEC root. Ignore the caption on the page: this is not about DNSSEC deployment, which is already happening just fine. It's about who gets to sign the root zone. more
Always good for information on the spam economy, Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has just published a truly fascinating article: Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits. Bottom line: a one-in-twelve-million conversion rate of spam to sales seems to be enough to keep the spam economy going. The article covers a project by researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, who managed to infiltrate the Storm Worm bot network and take over a small portion of it. more
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