Threat Intelligence

The Role of a Cybersecurity Czar

For years now, there have been calls for a high-level cybersecurity official, preferably reporting directly to the president. This has never happened. Indeed, there is a lot of unhappiness in some circles that President Obama has not appointed anyone as "czar" (or czarina), despite the early fanfare about the 60-day cybersecurity review. There are many reasons why nothing has happened... more

Announcement: Critical Internet Infrastructure WG is Now Open to Public Participation

ISOTF Critical Internet Infrastructure WG is now open to public participation. The group holds top experts on internet technology, critical infrastructure, and internet governance, from around the globe. Together, we discuss definitions, problems, challenges and solutions in securing and assuring the reliability of the global internet infrastructure, which is critical infrastructure for a growing number of nations, corporations and indeed, individuals -- world wide. more

Cybersecurity Workforce Needs to Grow 145% to Close Skills Gap Worldwide, Says New Study

The cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 145% to close the skills gap and better defend organizations worldwide according to a report released by (ISC)², a nonprofit membership association of certified cybersecurity professionals. more

RIPE 75: Imprssions of the Meeting

RIPE held its 75th meeting in Dubai in mid-October. As usual, there was a diverse set of presentations covering a broad range of activities that are taking place on today's Internet. The topics include issues relating to network operations, regulatory policies, peering and interconnection, communications practices within data centers, IPv6, the DNS, routing and network measurement. If that's not enough, the topic of the Internet of Things has been added as a Working Group in the RIPE pantheon. If you add address policy, database and RIPE services to the mix, you get a pretty packed five days with topics that would appeal to most Internet folks. more

An Investigative Analysis of the Silent Librarian IoCs

The Silent Librarian advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have been detected once again, as the academic year started in September. With online classes increasingly becoming the norm, the group's phishing campaigns that aim to steal research data and intellectual property could have a high success rate. Dozens of phishing domain names have been reported, although some may have already been taken down. more

Microsoft Becomes the Latest Company to Join the Internet Society’s MANRS Initiative

Microsoft has joined the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative, supported by the Internet Society (ISOC) with the primary objective is to reduce the most common threats to the Internet's routing system. Microsft is the latest of a number of industry giants around the world - including Oracle, GÉANT, and Comcast - to join MANRS. more

DNS: The Basis for Billions

In the midst of "Cyber Monday", the day traditionally seen as one of the year's busiest days for online shopping, it is only appropriate to examine the importance DNS plays for online economies. With DNS being at the heart of Internet connectivity it is easy to understand why DNS is important to the growing health of economies whose online health in dollars and euros rest in the billions. more

Helping Banks Fight Phishing and Account Fraud, Whether They Like It or Not

On Wednesday, Project Honey Pot filed an unusual lawsuit against "John Does stealing money from US businesses through unauthorized electronic transfers made possible by computer viruses transmitted in spam." Their attorney is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, who is one of the most experienced anti-spam lawyers around, with whom I have worked in the past. more

Help CrypTech (and Me) Make the Internet More Secure

Are you ready to help me make the Internet more secure? Here's your chance to join me in a project to create an open-source hardware device to protect email, files and other data from hackers and government spies. The CrypTech Project was founded in late 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US and other governments were exploiting weak cryptography and loose standards to gain access to citizens' email, documents, and other files. more

We Have a Paradigm for Surveillance That’s Broken, Fit Only for the Analogue Past

As each day brings new revelations about surveillance online, we are starting to see increasing activity in national legislatures intended either to establish more control over what the security services can do to their nationals (in countries like the US), or to limit access by foreign secret services to the personal information of their citizens (countries like Brazil). Unfortunately, neither of these approaches address the underlying problem: we have a paradigm for surveillance that's fit for the analogue past, not the digital present, let alone the future. more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

Understanding the Modern DDoS Threat

The breadth of cyber threats that an organization must engage with and combat seemingly change on a daily basis. Each new technology, vulnerability or exploit vector results in a new threat that must be protected against. Meanwhile some forms of attack never appear to age -- they remain a threat to business continuity despite years of advances in defensive strategy. One particularly insidious and never-ending threat is that of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. more

Routing Redundancy: How Much Is Enough?

Internet connectivity is a good thing. Many of us depend on it for everything from our livelihoods to our entertainment. However, the Internet is very fragile and even the The New York Times is worried about it. But they're primarily concerned with overloads that can occur when everyone on the planet does the same thing at roughly the same time, such as surfing for news about Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, we will never avoid all such scenarios. Physical systems are designed around average and typical peak loads, not around extremely high loads associated with very unlikely events. Who would pay for that? more

An Early Look at the State of Spam in 2009, Social Networking Spam on the Rise

As recently reported, spam volumes indicate spam has nearly jumped back up to its pre-McColo shutdown levels. However, Symantec's The State of Spam report has also observed that in recent days spammers are increasingly piggybacking on legitimate newsletters and using the reputation of major social networking sites to try and deliver spam messages into recipients' inboxes... In its special URL investigation the report also indicates that on average approximately 90 percent of all spam messages today contain some kind of a URL. Additionally, analysis of data from past recent days, according to Symantec, have shown that 68% of all URLs in spam messages had a '.com' Top-Level Domain (TLD), 18% had a China's '.cn' ccTLD and 5% had a '.net'. more

Major Flaw Found in WannaCry Raises Questions on Whether it was Really a Ransomware

An extensive analysis of WannaCry seems to indicate attackers would be unable to determine which users have paid the ransom and they cannot decrypt on a per-user basis. more