Threat Intelligence

New Study Highlights Growing Risk, Lack of Urgency with Mobile and IoT Application Security

Despite widespread concern about the security of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, organizations are ill-prepared for the risks they pose, according to a research report issued today from Ponemon Institute, IBM Security, and Arxan Technologies. more

Corporate Email Phishing Scams Result in $3.1B Loss, Near 1300% Increase in 18 Months

Total number of Business Email Compromise (BEC) related crimes have reached epidemic levels, at nearly $3.1 billion in losses and involving 22,143 victims worldwide since January 2015, according to a new FBI report. more

NeuStar Experiences Partial Outage as DynDNS Tries to Turn up the Heat

NeuStar's UltraDNS faced attack on two fronts on Tuesday, March 31. One of the attacks was technical -- a massive denial-of-service attack. The second was a rather surprising opening strike from competitor Dynamic Network Services (DynDNS), which launched a full-scale (and in T1R's opinion, misguided) public relations broadside. First, to the actual denial of service attack. Contrary to many early reports, UltraDNS was not 'down' on Tuesday... more

On Comcast and Net Neutrality: Shouting Fire in a Theater

The Comcast traffic shaping case has stirred up passionate debate. Net neutrality proponents are calling for Comcast's head on a platter. The common argument is that Comcast's policy may stifle innovation and competition. If a service provider is allowed to exercise unregulated discretion in how it treats subscriber traffic, it is a slippery slope toward anti-competitive practices. Net neutrality says keep your hands off. Some are preaching net neutrality as if it were an inalienable human right like freedom of speech... more

Research Detects Spammers Using Fake URL-Shortening Services

New research has uncovered evidence of spammers establishing their own fake URL-shortening services for the first time. According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence report, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages; instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. "Rather than leading directly to the spammer's final Web site, these links actually point to a shortened URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's final Web site." more

Estonian Cyber Security Strategy Document: Translated and Public

The Estonians have a public version of their cyber security strategy translated into English (currently available offline only). The concept of a national strategy for cyber security is one which I am particularly fond of... The following is the Summary section from the document which might be of interest... more

TLD Domain Abuse: Threat Report - First Half 2011

When it comes to building a robust globe-spanning network of crimeware and making the victims dance to a tune of the cyber-criminals' choosing, you're guaranteed to find domain name abuse at the heart of the operation. DNS provides the critical flexibility and underlying scalability of modern command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure. Cyber-criminals that master DNS (and manage to maintain the stream of new domain registrations that keep it fed) tend to find themselves in command of the largest and most profitable crimeware networks. more

WannaCry: Patching Dilemma from the Other Side

WannaCry, originated firstly in state projects but spread by other actors, has touched upon myriads of infrastructure such as hospitals, telecommunication, railroads that many countries have labelled as critical. IT engineers are hastily presenting patching codes in various localized versions. The other patch needed, however, is more than technical. It is normative and legislative. The coding of that patch for a situation like this is in two layers of dilemma. more

China Hacks Google, Etc.

Many news sources are reporting on how Google and other corporations were hacked by China. The reports, depending on vendor, blame either PDF files via email as the original perpetrator, or lay most of the blame on an Internet Explorer 0day. more

The Latest DNS Threat Landscape: Why CISOs Must Rethink Blocking Strategies

Cybercriminals live by the tenet "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." They'll use the same tactics repeatedly until they no longer work, then switch things up. That's why CISOs and their security teams maintain constant vigilance. Underscoring this, recent analysis of global DNS activity found that new domains continue to be a major tactic for bad actors. more

Comcast’s Impressive System for Notifying Infected Users

Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more

Brad Templeton in Response to Site Finder Controversy

A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error. more

Two More Crypto Holes

If you work in computer security, your Twitter feed and/or Inbox has just exploded with stories about not just one but two new holes in cryptographic protcols. One affects WiFi; the other affects RSA key pair generation by certain chips. How serious are these? I'm not going to go through the technical details. For KRACK, Matthew Green did an excellent blog post; for the other, full details are not yet available. There are also good articles on each of them. What's more interesting are the implications. more

Perspectives on a DNS-CERT

Last week at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, a plan was announced by ICANN staff to create a "CERT" for DNS. That's a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) for the global Domain Name System (DNS). There are all kinds of CERTs in the world today, both inside and outside the Internet industry. There isn't one for DNS, and that's basically my fault, and so I have been following the developments in Nairobi this week very closely. more

Google, Service Providers and the Future of P2P

In a non-operational NANOG discussion about Google bandwidth uses, several statements were made. It all started from the following post by Mark Boolootian: "Cringley has a theory and it involves Google, video, and oversubscribed backbones..." The following comment has to be one of the most important comments in the entire article and its a bit disturbing... more