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The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is soliciting comments on signing the DNSSEC root. Ignore the caption on the page: this is not about DNSSEC deployment, which is already happening just fine. It's about who gets to sign the root zone. more
Verisign recently published a technical report on new generic top-level domain (gTLD) security and stability considerations. The initial objective of the report was to assess for Verisign's senior management our own operational preparedness for new gTLDs, as both a Registry Service Provider for approximately 200 strings, as well as a direct applicant for 14 new gTLDs... However, in cataloging internal and external risks related to the new gTLD program, we found several far-reaching and long-standing issues that need to be further explored and/or resolved with varying levels of urgency. more
Back in March, it was widely reported that RSA had suffered a serious security breach that (to some extent) weakened the security of its SecurID token. However, the NY Times reported then that the chairman said that the penetration wasn't absolute but "it could potentially reduce the effectiveness of the system in the face of a 'broader attack.'". more
Before we get into what DNSSEC is and the benefits of it, let's talk about some of the other potential pitfalls of DNS. One of the most significant issues we have to deal with are denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. While DoS attacks are not specific to DNS we have seen DNS be a frequent target of these attacks. more
About a year ago after coming back from Estonia, I promised I'd send in an account of the Estonian "war". A few months ago I wrote an article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, covering the story of what happened there. This is the "war" that made politicians aware of cyber security and entire countries scared, NATO to "respond" and the US to send in "help". It deserved a better understanding for that alone, whatever actually happened there. more
Every now and then I get emails from readers of my blog. I mostly reply to them in private, but I recently got one question where I thought my reply might be of general interest. I took the liberty of editing the question somewhat, but in essence it was: "If you have any insight you can share with my class on cyber warfare and security, I would be delighted on hearing it." In general, I think that it's an obvious conclusion that both offensive and defensive actions with regard to national telecommunications infrastructure is becoming an integral part of a nations security assessments.... more
A wave of DNS hijacking is reported to have affected dozens of domains belonging to government, telecommunications and internet infrastructure entities across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America. more
Recent events have shown the threat of domain hijacking is very real; however, it is also largely preventable. As Verisign previously noted, there are many security controls that registrants can utilize to help strengthen their security posture. Verisign would like to reiterate this advice within the context of the recent domain hijacking reports. Domains are an important element of internet infrastructure; their functionality and security rely upon many factors such as their delegated name servers. more
Together with Thorsten Holz, I recently published a paper on fast flux botnet behaviors, "As the Net Churns: Fast-Flux Botnet Observations," based on data we gathered in our ATLAS platform. Fast flux service networks utilize botnets to distribute the web servers to the infected PCs... One of the most well known fast flux botnets has been the Storm Worm botnet, which uses the zombies to spam, send out new enticements to infect users, and to host the malicious website which delivers the malcode. more
As we blogged about recently, Neustar is committed to ensuring that the domain name system is secure and stable and has been operating top-level domains (TLDs) for over a decade. Tuesday, Neustar submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in response to ICANN's proposal to delay the launch of hundreds of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's decision to delay the launch is based on a study it commissioned that measured the potential frequency of domain-name collision. more
There have been many news stories of late about potential attacks on the American electoral system. Which attacks are actually serious? As always, the answer depends on economics. There are two assertions I'll make up front. First, the attacker -- any attacker -- is resource-limited. They may have vast resources, and in particular, they may have more resources than the defenders -- but they're still limited. Why? more
The cybersecurity debate can be highly confusing at times. There is perhaps an analogy to be made between "Cybersecurity" and "The Economy". We all want to fix the economy but making progress is not an easy task. As soon as you are beyond that statement you notice that there is a lot of nuance. Issues like trust, influence, actors, and affectivity all come to play when you want to fix the Economy. The cybersecurity discourse has similar features. more
There's a new sheriff in town and he's riding the horse of "predictive policing". Back in July the Santa Cruz Police Department began deploying police officers to places where crime is likely to occur in the future -- making use of new predictive modeling programs that are designed to provide daily forecasts of crime hotspots -- thereby allowing the Department to preempt more serious crimes before they occurred. In essence, this is another physical-world application of machine learning and clustering technologies -- applied to preempting a criminal problem. In the cyber-world we've been applying these techniques for a number of years with great success. more
Cisco today released a high-level alert warning about a vulnerability in IPv6 packet processing functions of multiple Cisco products that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to stop processing IPv6 traffic, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device. more
A name collision occurs when a user attempts to resolve a domain in one namespace, but it unexpectedly resolves in a different namespace. Name collision issues in the public global Domain Name System (DNS) cause billions of unnecessary and potentially unsafe DNS queries every day. A targeted outreach program that Verisign started in March 2020 has remediated one billion queries per day to the A and J root name servers, via 46 collision strings. more
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