Threat Intelligence

Internet Society Urges for Increased Effort to Address Unprecedented Challenges Facing the Internet

During the 11th Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a United Nations-convened conference taking place in Mexico, 6-9 December, the Internet Society urged the global Internet community to redouble its efforts in addressing the wave of unprecedented challenges facing the Internet. more

U.S. CERT Issues Alert on DNS Amplification Attacks

Neil Schwartzman writes to report that U.S. Cert issued Alert TA13-088A on Friday March 29, 2013. "It is a solid how-to guide to test for, and remediate DNS configurations that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks." more

IPv6 Will Change the Face of Email Filtering, Says Report

Data solutions provider Return Path has released a new report highlighting 20 visionary ideas for brands to "futureproof" their email program. Among various insights, the report warns brands that adoption of IPv6 will result in rising dependency on domain-based reputation. more

Online Drug Traffic and Registrar Policy

Last month I published an article called "What's Driving Spam and Domain Fraud? Illicit Drug Traffic" which explained how the many of the troublesome online crime issues are related to the online sale of narcotics and dodgy pharmaceuticals. Since this article was published we have witnessed one of the largest international law enforcement efforts against online drug traffic (Operation Pangea II)... more

How Hard Is It to Deploy DKIM?

It's coming up on two years since the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard was published. While we're seeing a certain amount of signed mail from Google, Paypal, and ESPs, there's still a long way to go. How hard is it to sign your mail with DKIM? The major hurdle might seem to be getting mail software that can sign outgoing mail. more

Why Government Agencies Use Ugly, Difficult to Use Scanned PDFs - There’s More Than Meets the Eye

Sometimes, a government agency will post a PDF that doesn't contain searchable text. Most often, it's a scan of a printout. Why? Don't the NSA, the Department of Justice, etc., know how to convert Word (or whatever) directly to PDF? It turns out that they know more than some of their critics do. The reason? With a piece of paper, you know much more about what you're actually disclosing. more

Client-based WDS: Providing Application Acceleration in Mobile and VPN Environments

Wide-Area Data Services (WDS), aka "WAN Optimization" is becoming the most effective way to improve application performance while reducing network traffic. In scenarios where there is significant network latency that would otherwise render many applications unusable, WDS can deliver almost LAN-like speed. Where bandwidth constraints exist and there is no practical or economical option, WDS can help reduce network traffic, allowing you to postpone or avoid circuit upgrades altogether. The technology provides the ability to centralize applications and servers, furthering the cost savings on hardware, software licensing, maintenance and the operation of a distributed architecture. more

Researches Demonstrate How IPv6 Attacks Can Bypass Network Intrusion Detection Systems

With the increasing popularity of IoT devices and the added interest of transition to IPv6, a whole new range of threat vectors are evolving that allow attackers to set up undetectable communications channels across networks. more

US Department of Defense Getting Aggressive on Adoption of Cloud, Machine Learning

The US Department of Defense is seeking private sector's help to "vault DOD" into the world of elastic computing, data management and analytics, cybersecurity, and machine learning. more

Demand for Cybersecurity Workers in the United States Has Nearly Doubled Since 2013

Cybersecurity job postings in the United States has nearly doubled since 2013 and is growing three times as fast as other IT roles, according to a new report from the labor market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies. more

P2P as a New Spam Medium, Moving From PoC to Full Operations

Spam on P2P networks used to be mainly with advertising inside downloaded movies and pictures (mainly pornographic in nature), as well as by hiding viruses and other malware in downloaded warez and most any other file type (from zip archives to movie files). Further, P2P networks were in the past used for harvesting by spammers. Today, P2P has become a direct to customer spamvertizing medium. This has been an ongoing change for a while. As we speak, it is moving from a proof of concept trial to a full spread of spam, day in, day out... more

Jakarta Declaration Calls on Governments to Recognize Legitimacy of Encryption

Today in Indonesia, media leaders gathered at UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event issued the "Jakarta Declaration" calling on governments of the world to recognize the importance of a free and independent media in creating "peaceful, just and inclusive societies". The declaration calls on governments to take steps to support the freedom of the press, and, in the midst of the many actions was this statement: Recognise the legitimacy of the use of encryption and anonymisation technologies more

EFF Resigns from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over EME Decision

In an open letter to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced on Tuesday that it is resigning from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in response to the organization publishing Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a standard. more

Phishing: An Interesting Twist on a Common Scam

After Two Security Assessments I Must Be Secure, Right? Imagine you are the CIO of a national financial institution and you've recently deployed a state of the art online transaction service for your customers. To make sure your company's network perimeter is secure, you executed two external security assessments and penetration tests. When the final report came in, your company was given a clean bill of health. At first, you felt relieved, and confident in your security measures. Shortly thereafter, your relief turned to concern. ...Given you're skepticism, you decide to get one more opinion. ...And the results were less than pleasing. more

Researchers Use Social Graphs to Detect Spammers, Attackers

A project named S-GPS or Spammer Global Positioning System, by Microsoft researchers uses spammer identification rather than spam identification to identify zombie-based spammers. more