Threat Intelligence

Over a Billion Email Addresses of Major Spam Operation Exposed via Unprotected Backups

A spamming group called River City Media (RCM) has had its database of 1.4 billion records leaked. This was revealed today by MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris Vickery in cooperation with CSO Online and Spamhaus. more

Old Dog, New Tricks: Gift Card Scams in Social Networks

In the past few months, a flurry of gift card scams leveraging such high-profile brands as Best Buy, Whole Foods and IKEA have emerged on Facebook. These scams often use the brand's logo, website URL, or general "look and feel" on Facebook "fan" pages to give the impression that these offers are legitimate. Some scams are even bold enough to include bogus, non-interactive fan comments to add a greater sense of authenticity to the gift card offer. To date, these scams have been successful at tricking tens of thousands of consumers. In just one day, for example, a fan page titled "IKEA Get a FREE $1000 IKEA Gift Card! (ONLY AVAILABLE 1 DAY)" registered 40,000 fans before being shut down. more

The Human Factor in DDoS Attacks

Ripped from the headlines: A recent DDoS attack lasted an entire 60 days. In other news, a single site was attacked 218 times in Q2 alone. To those of us in the business of protecting Web infrastructure, these stories are hardly surprising. What's notable, though, is where they were reported, in The Financial, whose focus is banking and financial services, not technology. The reporters used the term "DDoS" as if it were as common as "hedge fund," something everyday business people, not just techies, grasp. It's this human element that caught my interest and got me thinking a little. more

Half of Phishing Sites in the Wild Have SSL Certificates and Show Padlock Security Icon, Study Finds

A new study by anti-phishing company PhishLabs reveals 49 percent of all phishing sites in the third quarter of 2018 had Secure Sockets Layer or SSL with HTTPS in their URL. more

US Senators Urge Canada to Drop China’s Huawei Technologies in Building Future Telecom Networks

U.S. Senators Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, both critics of China, have urged Canada to consider dropping China's Huawei Technologies from helping to build next-generation 5G telecommunications networks. more

Where Every Phisher Knows Your Name

Spear phishing is the unholy love child of email spam and social engineering. It refers to when a message is specifically crafted, using either public or previously stolen information, to fool the recipient into believing that it's legitimate. This personalization is usually fairly general, like mentioning the recipient's employer (easily gleaned from their domain name.) Sometimes they address you by name. Much scarier is when they use more deeply personal information stolen from one of your contacts... more

Google Reports 18 Million Daily COVID-19 Related Malware, Phishing Emails Per Day

During the last week, Google says it has been seeing 18 million malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 daily. This, the company reported today, "is in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages." more

Software Insecurity: The Problem with the White House Cybersecurity Proposals

The White House has announced a new proposal to fix cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the positive effects will be minor at best; the real issue is not addressed. This is a serious missed opportunity by the Obama adminstration; it will expend a lot of political capital, to no real effect... The proposals focus on two things: improvements to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and provisions intended to encourage information sharing. At most, these will help at the margins; they'll do little to fix the underlying problems. more

Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government

An unprecedented cyberattack on the Canadian government also targeted Defence Research and Development Canada, making it the third key department compromised by hackers, CBC News has learned. ... While there is no definitive proof, of course, that China was behind these attacks, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. China (allegedly) has a long history of engaging in espionage activities in order to gain access to information. In the United States, this is sometimes referred to as cyber warfare, but I think that cyber espionage is a better choice of terms. more

DNSSEC is But One Link in the Security Chain

As the implementation of DNSSEC continues to gather momentum and with a number of ccTLDs, and the '.org' gTLD having deployed it into their production systems, I think it is worth pausing to take a look at the entire DNSSEC situation. Whilst it is absolutely clear that DNSSEC is a significant step forward in terms of securing the DNS, it is but one link in the security chain and is therefore not, in itself, a comprehensive solution to fully securing the DNS system. more

DNSSEC and DNS over TLS

The APNIC Blog has recently published a very interesting article by Willem Toorop of NLnet Labs on the relationship between Security Extensions for the DNS (DNSSEC) and DNS over Transport Layer Security. Willem is probably being deliberately provocative in claiming that "DoT could realistically become a viable replacement for DNSSEC." If provoking a reaction was indeed Willem's intention, then he has succeeded for me, as it has prompted this reaction. more

The Spamhaus Distributed Denial of Service - How Big a Deal Was It?

If you haven't been reading the news of late, venerable anti-spam service Spamhaus has been the target of a sustained, record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack over the past couple of weeks... Of course, bad guys are always mad at Spamhaus, and so they had a pretty robust set-up to begin with, but whoever was behind this attack was able to muster some huge resources, heretofore never seen in intensity, and it had some impact, on the Spamhaus website, and to a limited degree, on the behind-the-scenes services that Spamhaus uses to distribute their data to their customers. more

Secure Domain Foundation Launched to Help Internet Infrastructure Operators Fight Cybercrime

Experts and companies in the information security industry today announced the formation of the Secure Domain Foundation (SDF), a new, non-profit, community-driven organization devoted to the identification and prevention of Internet cyber crime utilizing the domain name system (DNS). more

Behind the Smoke Screen of Internet and International Infrastructure

In my recent write-up I start by discussing some recent threats network operators should be aware of, such as recursive DNS attacks. Then, a bit on the state of the Internet, cooperation across different fields and how these latest threats with DDoS also relate to worms and bots, as well as spam, phishing and the immense ROI organized crime sees. I try and bring some suggestions on what can be done better, and where we as a community, as well as specifically where us, the "secret hand-shake clubs" of Internet security fail and succeed. Over-secrecy, lack of cooperation, lack of public information, and not being secret enough about what really matters. more

97% of All Global 2000 Companies at Risk from SAD DNS Attack

There is a new threat in town known as "SAD DNS" that allows attackers to redirect traffic, putting companies at risk of phishing, data breach, reputation damage, and revenue loss. What is SAD DNS? No, it isn't the domain name system (DNS) feeling moody, but an acronym for a new-found threat -- "Side-channel AttackeD DNS" discovered by researchers that could revive DNS cache poisoning attacks. more