Threat Intelligence

Enterprise Networks Are Being Impacted by Unwanted and Unidentified Cryptomining Activity

Researchers at security service provider, Zscaler, are reporting that in the past six months they have blocked over 2.5 billion web-based cryptomining attempts within their cloud service. more

Namecoin Decentralized DNS Research

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

Edge Computing, Fog Computing, IoT, and Securing Them All

The oft used term "the Internet of Things" (IoT) has expanded to encapsulate practically any device (or "thing") with some modicum of compute power that in turn can connect to another device that may or may not be connected to the Internet. ... The information security community -- in fact, the InfoSec industry at large -- has struggled and mostly failed to secure the "IoT". This does not bode well for the next evolutionary advancement of networked compute technology. more

Maintaining Security and Stability in the Internet Ecosystem

DDoS attacks, phishing scams and malware. We battle these dark forces every day - and every day they get more sophisticated. But what worries me isn't just keeping up with them, it is keeping up with the sheer volume of devices and data that these forces can enlist in an attack. That's why we as an industry need to come together and share best practices - at the ICANN community, at the IETF and elsewhere - so collectively we are ready for the future. more

The Growing Threat of Cybersquatting in the Banking and Finance Sector

The apparent cyber heist of of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank's U.S. account may cause some people to question the security of online banking. While the online theft prompted SWIFT - a cooperative owned by 3,000 financial institutions around the world -- to make sure banks are following recommended security practices, the incident also could have ramifications for banking customers worldwide. more

Oracle Launches Internet Intelligence Map Providing Insight Into the Impact of Internet Disruptions

Oracle today announced the launch of the Internet Intelligence Map website; a source available for free that provides country-level connectivity statistics based on traceroutes, BGP, and DNS query volumes on a single dashboard. more

Zoom Faces Class-Action Lawsuit, Accused of Overstating Its Privacy Standards

The video-conferencing company Zoom is facing a class-action suit filed on Tuesday accusing it of overstating its privacy standards and failing to disclose that its service was not end-to-end encrypted. more

Blocking a DDoS Upstream

In the first post on DDoS, I considered some mechanisms to disperse an attack across multiple edges (I actually plan to return to this topic with further thoughts in a future post). The second post considered some of the ways you can scrub DDoS traffic. This post is going to complete the basic lineup of reacting to DDoS attacks by considering how to block an attack before it hits your network -- upstream. more

University of California Identifies the Next Hard Target in a Never Ending War

This is, of course, about the recent NYT article that showcases the results of Prof Stefan Savage and his colleagues from UCSD/Berkeley. As my good friend and longtime volunteer at CAUCE, Ed Falk, points out, this is a great find, but hardly a FUSSP. The nice thing about the fight against bots and spammers is these little victories people on "our" side keep having in an endless series of skirmishes and battles... more

Notorious Markets, Scams and Implications for Brands

On January 14, 2021, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released its 2020 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy (the Notorious Markets List, or NML). This publication enumerates online and physical markets that have been reported to engage in trademark, counterfeiting, and copyright infringement at scale. For the first time, the NML documents show how internet platforms play a part in bringing illicit goods into the US. more

Researchers Discover Over 1.5 Billion Files Exposed Through Misconfigured Data Services

Many administrators misconfigure cloud storage, such Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, resulting in the contents being publicly-accessible. more

How Many Bots? How Many Botnets?

We touched on this subject in the past, but recently Rich Kulawiek wrote a very interesting email to NANOG to which I replied, and decided to share my answer here as well: I stopped really counting bots a while back. I insisted, along with many friends, that counting botnets was what matters. When we reached thousands we gave that up. We often quoted anti-nuclear weapons proliferation sentiments from the Cold War, such as: "why be able to destroy the world a thousand times over if once is more than enough?" we often also changed it to say "3 times" as redundancy could be important... more

Black Frog: Next Generation Botnet, No Generation Spam Fighting

Black Frog -- a new effort to continue the SO-CALLED Blue Security fight against spammers. A botnet, a crime, a stupid idea that I wish would have worked -- News items on Black Frog. Blue Frog by Blue Security was a good effort. Why? Because they wanted to "get spammers back". They withstood tremendous DDoS attacks and abuse reports, getting kicked from ISP after ISP. ...The road to hell is filled with good intentions. Theirs was golden, but they got to hell, quite literally, non-the-less. ...When Blue Security went down, some of us made a bet as to when two bored guys sitting and planning their millions in some café would show up, with Blue Security's business plan minus the DDoS factor. Well -- they just did. more

Anti-Spoofing, BCP 38, and the Tragedy of the Commons

In the seminal 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" , Garrett Hardin introduced the world to an idea which eventually grew into a household phrase. In this blog article I will explore whether Hardin's tragedy applies to anti-spoofing and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet, or not... Hardin was a biologist and ecologist by trade, so he explains "The Tragedy of the Commons" using a field, cattle and herdsmen. more

Cyberattack Causes Operational Disruption to Critical Infrastructure Using New Malware TRITON

A new malware designed to manipulate industrial safety systems was deployed against a critical infrastructure organization that provides emergency shutdown capability for industrial processes, according to a report released today. more