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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. more
Here at the Anti-Phishing Working Group meeting in Hong Kong, we've just released the latest APWG Global Phishing Survey. Produced by myself and my research partner Rod Rasmussen of Internet Identity, it's an in-depth look at the global phishing problem in the second half of 2013. Overall, the picture isn't pretty. There were at least 115,565 unique phishing attacks worldwide during the period. This is one of the highest semi-annual totals we've observed since we began our studies in 2007. more
The African Union's Convention on the Establishment of a Credible Legal Framework for Cyber Security in Africa (AUCC) has been the focus of debate recently.To shed light on online security issues in Africa, CIO East Africa sought the views of Ms Sophia Bekele, an internet security expert and international policy advisor over internet and ICT. more
Delegation from the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs) - CEN, CENELEC and ETSI - met with Neelie Kroes, the Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, in Brussels yesterday (2 April 2014) discussing how to maximize the positive contribution that standards can make to enhancing internet security and protecting personal data, in order to support the successful implementation of the EU Cybersecurity Strategy. more
The Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, April 2, 2014 on "Ensuring the Security, Stability, Resilience, and Freedom of the Global Internet." more
Experts and companies in the information security industry today announced the formation of the Secure Domain Foundation (SDF), a new, non-profit, community-driven organization devoted to the identification and prevention of Internet cyber crime utilizing the domain name system (DNS). more
The number one concern cited for avoiding cloud computing is security. And there is a reason for that. Cloud providers have demonstrated some spectacular failures in the past, including Amazon's near total shutdown of an entire region, Dropbox's authentication snafu, and innumerous cloud providers that go belly-up. However, in the long run, cloud computing is destined to become more secure than in-house IT. I will briefly describe two dynamics in the industry that point in that direction, with substantiating evidence. more
Earlier this week Verisign sponsored a two day conference on name collisions in the DNS. Despite the very short time frame in which it was organized, only a month from announcement to meeting, there were some very good presentations. I'll just hit some highlights here; all of the papers and slides are on their web site at namecollisions.net. Sunday morning started with a keynote by Bruce Schneier, who is not a DNS expert (and doesn't claim to be) but had some interesting observations on names in general. more
There have been quite a few news stories released over the last 24 hours regarding a wide-scale compromise of 300,00 Internet gateway devices. Here's the executive summary of what happened, how to check if you are vulnerable, and what you can do to fix it... If you use any of these devices, you should check it to ensure your device has not been compromised. more
I'm delighted to announce that the name collisions workshop this weekend will include Jeff Schmidt, CEO of JAS Global Advisors, presenting the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework that his firm just released for public review. Jeff's presentation is one of several on the program announced by the program committee for the Workshop and Prize on Root Causes and Mitigations of Name Collisions (WPNC). more
A widespread compromise of consumer-grade small office/home office (SOHO) routers has been discovered by threat intelligence group Team Cymru. According to the report, "attackers are altering the DNS configuration on these devices in order to redirect victims DNS requests and subsequently replace the intended answers with IP addresses and domains controlled by the attackers, effectively conducting a Man-in-the-Middle attack." more
There are quite a lot of NTP-amplified denial of service attacks going around at the moment targeting tech and ecommerce companies, including some in the email space. What does NTP-amplifed mean? NTP is "Network Time Protocol" - it allows computers to set their clocks based on an accurate source, and keep them accurate. It's very widely used - OS X and Windows desktops typically use it by default, and most servers should have it running. more
In January 1995, the RFC Editor published RFC 1752: "The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol"... The Internet is a security officer's nightmare -- so much openness, so easy to capture packet traffic (and/or spoof it!) and send all manner of unwanted traffic. It was built as a research network, hosted by institutes that were 1/ professionally responsible and 2/ interested in working together collegially. So, in the 19 years since the publication of that statement, have we really failed to address the stated goal? more
The holidays open up a block of time to catch up on "I meant to read that" bookmarks, RSS feeds, and all the favorited and forgotten tweets. I made it through 50 before a NormanShark blog post kicked off a research project. The analysts found a malware sample which was using .bit domains in their communications infrastructure, but .bit ... what is that? .bit is a TLD operating outside of ICANN. Some would say they are TLD squatting, but I leave that opinion up to the reader. more
BGP. Border Gateway Protocol. The de-facto standard routing protocol of the Internet. The nervous system of the Internet. I don't think I can overstate the importance, the criticality of BGP to the operation of the modern Internet. BGP is the glue that holds the Internet together at its core. And like so many integral pieces of the Internet, it, too, is designed and built on the principle of trust... The folks who operate the individual networks that make up the Internet are generally interested in keeping the Internet operating, in keeping the packets flowing. And they do a great job, for the most part. more
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