The fifth-annual survey of domain name servers (DNS) on the public Internet -- called a "Pandora's box of both frightening and hopeful results" -- was released today by The Measurement Factory in partnership with Infoblox. more
Gary Warner over at Cyber Crime and Doing Time has a good post up this week about the CallService.biz website being shut down. I have posted a few good excerpts and added my comments to the end. ... Warner's take on the world of spam, malware, hacking and phishing is that unless people actually go to jail because they are spamming, the problem of spamming will never get better. That's because when the security industry fixes the latest hole or comes up with a new technology to stop the newest threat, spammers simply move onto another. more
Recent comments on the name collisions issue in the new gTLD program raise a question about the differences between established and new gTLDs with respect to name collisions, and whether they're on an even playing field with one another. Verisign's latest public comments on ICANN's "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions" Phase One Report, in answering the question, suggest that the playing field the industry should be concerned about is actually in a different place. The following points are excerpted from the comments submitted April 21. more
"I've anticipated this day for ages -- the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based on our own secure operating system landed on my desk," writes Eugene Kaspersky, Chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, in a blog post introducing company's layer 3 switch powered by Kaspersky OS. more
As a follow up to Susan Brenner's Networks and Nationalization and my comment there, I will go further in this post and talk about the "cyberwar" and "offense" aspects of her article. I think I made this point elsewhere as well... but before getting into a war, it'd be a brilliant idea to actually know that you can win. Cyberwarfare is the sort of game where you don't really need to be a huge government with the largest standing army in the world and sophisticated weaponry in order to win... more
Linguistic Internet is becoming stronger with the first leap to develop non-Latin applications, as Arabic Language SSL Certificates has been launched by M/s ArabicSSL with the support of Live Multilingual Translator and The Multilingual Internet Group. This step is highly appreciable because this will ensure the security and stability and develop trust over new Internet layers of Internationalized Domains (IDN TLDs). more
Earlier this year, I wrote about a recent enhancement to privacy in the Domain Name System (DNS) called qname-minimization. Following the principle of minimum disclosure, this enhancement reduces the information content of a DNS query to the minimum necessary to get either an authoritative response from a name server, or a referral to another name server. more
Many years ago on my first trip to London, I encountered for the first time signs that warned pedestrians that vehicles might be approaching in a different direction than they were accustomed to in their home countries, given the left-versus-right-side driving patterns around the world. (I wrote a while back about one notable change from left-to-right, the Swedish "H Day," as a comment on the IPv6 transition.) more
DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has been deployed for .COM, Internet's largest domain extension with more than 90 million registrations. The announced was made today by VeriSign, the registry operator for .COM. more
This weekend Jari Arkko, Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Stephen Farrell, IETF Security Area Director, published a joint statement on the IETF blog titled: "Security and Pervasive Monitoring"... They go on to outline some of the IETF's general principles around security and privacy as well as some of the new developments. They also point out a vigorous (and still ongoing) discussion within the IETF around how to improve the security of the Internet in light of recent disclosures. more
Results from the 2019 Marsh-Microsoft Global Cyber Risk Perception survey indicates several encouraging signs of improvement in the way organizations view and manage cyber risk. more
A significant rise has been detected in the use of malware aimed at harvesting consumer data, known as password stealers. more
ICANN's second level domain (SLD) blocking proposal includes a provision that a party may demonstrate that an SLD not in the initial sample set could cause "severe harm," and that SLD can potentially be blocked for a certain period of time. The extent to which that provision would need to be exercised remains to be determined. However, given the concerns outlined in Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, it seems likely that there could be many additions (and deletions!) from the blocked list given the lack of correlation between the DITL data and actual at-risk queries. more
Google has received a lot of press regarding their Project Shield announcement at the Google Ideas Summit. The effort is being applauded as a milestone in social consciousness. While on the surface the endeavor appears admirable, the long-term impact of the service may manifest more than Google had hoped for. Project Shield is an invite-only service that combines Google's DDoS mitigation technology and Page Speed service... more
In the last year or so, there's been a lot of controversy about some employers demanding social network passwords from employees or applicants. There's even been a bill introduced in Congress to bar the practice. The focus has been the privacy violation implied by such demands... The first issue is that a password gives the holder write access, not just read access, to the account. more