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Over the past several years, questions about how to protect information exchanged in the DNS have come to the forefront. One of these questions was posed first to DNS resolver operators in the middle of the last decade, and is now being brought to authoritative name server operators: "to encrypt or not to encrypt?" It's a question that Verisign has been considering for some time as part of our commitment to security, stability and resiliency of our DNS operations and the surrounding DNS ecosystem. more
Once you've determined that you can trust the signer of a message, as we discussed in part 3, it's easy to extrapolate that various portions of the message are equally trustworthy. For example, when there's a valid DKIM signature, we might assume that the From: header isn't spoofed. But in reality, DKIM only tells us two basic things... more
Are you concerned about the recent reports about government surveillance programs? Are you concerned about security and privacy online? If so, you may want to attend (in person or remotely) the INET Washington DC event happening on Wednesday, July 24, from 2:00 - 6:00 pm US Eastern time at George Washington University. Sponsored by the Internet Society and GWU's Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, the event is free and open to the public and will also be streamed live on the Internet for those who cannot attend in person. more
Google launched today a new effort to track the progress of encryption efforts - both at Google and on other popular websites. Google hopes the project will hold the company and others accountable to encrypt so as to enhance web safety and security. more
The March 19, 2020, guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) declared what global citizens appreciate more each day as the COVID-19 pandemic crisis unfolds: "Functioning critical infrastructure is imperative during the response to the COVID-19 emergency for both public health and safety as well as community well-being." 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
There's been a lot of media attention in the last few days to a wonderful research paper on the weakness of 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman and on how the NSA can (and possibly does) exploit this. People seem shocked about the problem and appalled that the NSA would actually exploit it. Neither reaction is right. In the first place, the limitations of 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman have been known for a long time. RFC 3766, published in 2004, noted that a 1228-bit modulus had less than 80 bits of strength. That's clearly too little. more
There has been plenty of buzz and chatter on the Internet recently concerning a very large DDoS attack against CloudFlare, with coverage on their blog, the New York Times, and the BBC, among many others. While attacks of this nature are certainly nothing new, the scale of this attack was surprising, reported to hit 120Gbps. For a sense of scale, your average cable modem is only about 20Mbps, or about 0.016% of that bandwidth. more
Recent study indicates that US continues to widen its lead as the number one country when it comes to hosting phishing sites. According to the latest Brandjacking Index just released by MarkMonitor, US-hosted phishing sites grew by ten percent from last quarter -- up from 36 percent to 46 percent. Canada is now at second position with 4.7 percent of all phishing attacks, followed by the Russian Federation (4.5 percent), France (4 percent), and Denmark (4 percent). more
DNSSEC is a hot topic. It's a technology newly unleashed on popular networking, which has led to countless articles and posts on the subject, including right here on CircleID. The way a lot of articles try to get your attention is to talk about a technology, like DNSSEC, in a way that makes the technology either seem really significant or really complicated. That is why a lot of articles about DNSSEC make it sound like something huge, complicated, and scary. But it's not. more
J. Nicholas Hoover reporting in InformationWeek: "The White House on Wednesday issued an update of the Obama administration's ongoing cybersecurity work, detailing some of the steps being taken in an effort to secure the nation's networks against cyber attacks and in the process offering some new insight into the administration's future plans. The progress report, issued immediately after a meeting held by White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt with agency secretaries, cybersecurity experts..." more
The United States has shifted its Russia strategy more toward offense and inserted potentially crippling malware inside Russia's electric power grid at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before, according to a New York Times's story that broke over the weekend. more
In the wake of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, not even six hours after Donald Trump became the nation's President-Elect, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group launched a series of coordinated and well-planned spear phishing campaigns. more
While scanning its index, Google in the last two months reports to have found more than 4,000 different websites suspected of distributing malware by massively compromising popular websites. "Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc.," says Google's security team member, Niels Provos, in a blog post today. more
Maintaining an 150 year old house requires two things, a lot of time and a lot of trips to the hardware store. Since the closest hardware store to my house is Home Depot, it is rare that a weekend passes without at least one trip to Home Depot. So now in the wake of the Home Depot data breach I am through no fault of my own in a situation where any or all of the bank cards I use regularly could be cancelled if the issuer decides they might be compromised. And this is not the first time this has happened to me this year. more