On Tuesday, 2020 U.S. presidential candidate John Delaney announced a plan to create a Department of Cybersecurity. more
In the past 24 months, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have changed profoundly. Gone are the days when attackers worked under the radar, when machines were infected by botnet code unknowingly and attacks were disguised leaving very little to trace the exact origin. ... The other game-changer: It's easier than ever to execute attacks. The tools are so widely available that anyone with basic skills and a high-speed connection can become a "hacktivist." more
As noted in the first part of this series, Security and Reliability encompasses holistic network assessments, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing. In this post I'd like to go deeper into network assessments. I stated last time that the phrase "network assessment" is broad. more
A hacking incident over the weekend attacked networks in a number of countries including data centers in Iran where they left the image of a U.S. flag on screens along with a warning: "Don't mess with our elections." more
The recent heavy news coverage of WannaCry has overshadowed the latest WikiLeaks release of critical CIA malware documentation: user manuals for two hacking tools named AfterMidnight and Assassin. more
As news of the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to emerge, CSC has undertaken the first in a series of studies looking at how the development of the crisis has affected online content. This first article looks at the numbers of registered domains with names containing coronavirus-related strings - "coronavirus" or "covid(-)19" (optional hyphen) - and analyzes the types of content present on the associated websites. more
Security experts at RSA Research Lab have reported the discovery of a new type of phishing attack targeted against online banking customers that combines a typical phishing website with a live change session initiated by fraudsters. The technique dubbed "Chat-in-the-Middle" not only attempts to trick customers into entering their usernames and passwords into a phishing site but obtains further sensitive information (such as answers to secret questions used by banks to authenticate customers). According to the report, this attack is currently targeting a single U.S.-based financial institution, however operators of all online banking websites are cautioned. more
In today's world with botnets, viruses and other nefarious applications that use DNS to further their harmful activities, outbound DNS security has been largely overlooked. As a part of multi-layer security architecture, a DNS Firewall should not be ignored. After serving as a consultant for multiple organizations, I have encountered many companies that allow all internal devices to send outbound DNS queries to external DNS servers - a practice that can lead to myriad problems. more
A report, released today by McAfee, Inc., titled "Security Takes the Offensive," says that traditionally, security technology companies and computer users have taken a defensive posture, putting the cyber equivalent of body armor on computers, networks and in the cloud. The report's authors say it is now time to avoid enemy strikes altogether by taking a more aggressive stance, aligning forces and involving law enforcement. more
President-elect Donald J. Trump has named Thomas P. Bossert, a top national security aide under President George W. Bush, to be his homeland security adviser, the Trump transition team announced Tuesday morning," Michael D. Shear reporting in the New York Times. more
A data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, is reported to have exposed a database that contained close to 340 million personal records on a publicly accessible server. more
The project to sign the DNS root zone with DNSSEC took an additional step toward completion yesterday with the last of the "root server" hosts switching to serving signed DNSSEC data. Now every DNS query to a root server can return DNSSEC-signed data, albeit the "deliberately unvalidatable" data prior to the final launch. Another key piece for a working signed root is the acceptance of trust anchors in the form of DS records from top-level domain operators. These trust anchors are used to form the chain of trust from the root zone to the TLD. 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
Michael Cooney reporting in NetworkWorld: "Security researchers this week will detail a prototype system they say can better detect so-called Domain Name Generation- (DGA) based botnets such as Conficker and Kraken without the usual labor- and time-intensive reverse-engineering required to find and defeat such malware. The detection system, called Pleiades, monitors traffic below the local DNS server and analyzes streams of unsuccessful DNS resolutions..." more
SANS has announced NetWars CyberCity, a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop. NetWars CyberCity was developed to teach cyber warriors from the U.S. Military how online actions can have kinetic effects. more