Threat Intelligence

German High Court Says No to Retaining Telecom, Email Data for Tracking Criminal Networks

The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."
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Is Cybersecurity a Priority? You Wouldn’t Know It If You Go by Top Level Defections

In the US administration, we see important people like incoming Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta say at his Senate confirmation hearing that "a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor" could well be a cyberattack that cripples the U.S. power grid and financial and government systems. He also said that cybersecurity will be one of the main focuses of his tenure at the Pentagon. But when you look at what is actually happening in cyber security, there is more position jockeying than there is real progress. more

Facebook and PGP

Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It's an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook's possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting. The first question, of course, is why Facebook has done this. It will only appeal to a very small minority of users. Using encrypted email is not easy. more

How to Steal Reputation

The term "reputation hijacking" continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press. It's intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else's system -- usually one of the large webmail providers -- to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they're hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider's IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new... more

Probability of ROI and Tighter Network Security by Blocking Malicious Subdomains

Failing to block a stealthy malicious host from making connections to your network could cost your company millions of dollars, a damaged reputation, and severe losses in sensitive private data. Threat intel teams have faced on-going problems: Expensive feeds that are slow to catch new threats; Chasing false positives in alerts wastes time and money; and Vendors selling a new appliance for every ill. Would 100% of your users Spot the Bot? more

A Cynic’s View of 2015 Security Predictions - Part 2

Every year those in the security industry are bombarded with various cyber security predictions. There's the good, the bad and the ugly. Some predictions are fairly ground breaking, while others are just recycled from previous years -- that's allowed of course if the threats still stand. In part one of my predictions I looked at the malware threats, so let's take a look at big data and the cloud for part two. more

Are Phishing and Malware Separate Threats?

Phishing is when bad guys try to impersonate a trusted organization, so they can steal your credentials. Typically they'll send you a fake e-mail that appears to be from a bank, with a link to a fake website that also looks like the bank. Malware offers another more insidious way to steal your credentials, by running unwanted code on your computer... I like VeriSign's characterization of this kind of malware as an insecure endpoint, the PC which is the endpoint of the conversation with the bank isn't actually under the control of the person who's using it. more

NATO Announces 58 Million Euro Investment in Cyber Defence

The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) has announced the award of a contract for upgrading the NATO cyber defence capabilities. The award to private industrial companies will enable the already operating NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC) to achieve full operational capability by the end of 2012. At approximately 58 million Euro, it represents NATO's largest investment to date in cyber defence. more

RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days. So this is by no means all that was presented through the week... As is usual for RIPE meetings, it was a well organised, informative and fun meeting to attend in every respect! If you are near Copenhagen in late May next year I'd certainly say that it would be a week well spent. more

More Privacy for Domain Registrants – Heightened Risk for Internet Users

A recent exchange on CircleID highlighted a critical need for data to inform the debate on the impact of ICANN's post-GDPR WHOIS policy that resulted in the redaction of domain name registrant contact data. A bit of background: in my original post, I made the point that domain name abuse had increased post-GDPR. A reader who works with a registrar (according to his bio) commented: "Can you back up that statement with data? Our abuse desk has actually seen a reduction in abuse complaints." more

Who Is Responsible for Your Application’s Security?

The dividing line between developers and IT operations used to be distinct. Developers were responsible for adding new features securely, but it was IT operations who had responsibility for infrastructure and network security. For the most part, developers didn't have to think too much about the wider security context. With the advent of the cloud, and of devops, things changed radically. more

Omnibus Cybersecurity Bill May Not Go Where Original Authors Intended

In an interview with GovInfoSecurity, Sen. Thomas Carper said that the U.S. Senate is considering attaching cybersecurity legislation to a defense authorizations bill. Though clearly a ploy to be able to say "we did something about those evil hackers" before the elections, CAUCE applauds the attempt. There can be no doubt that the United States (and many other countries) sorely needs better laws to deal with these threats. more

Routing Attacks on Internet Services

This post was co-authored by Yixin Sun, Annie Edmundson, Henry Birge-Lee, Jennifer Rexford, and Prateek Mittal. In this post, we discuss a recent thread of research that highlights the insecurity of Internet services due to the underlying insecurity of Internet routing. We hope that this thread facilitates important dialog in the networking, security, and Internet policy communities to drive change and adoption of secure mechanisms for Internet routing. more

Bypassing Geo-Locked BYOD Applications

In the wake of increasingly lenient bring your own device (BYOD) policies within large corporations, there's been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space - essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones. more

Spam from Mobile Networks? Who Woulda Thought…

Mobile networks aren't usually thought of as sources of spam, but a quick look at some of the resources that track spam reveals they actually are. This is counter intuitive at first glance because when most people think of mobile they think of smartphones, and those aren't known to be sources of spam (at least not yet). What's really going on is PCs connected to mobile networks with air cards, or tethered with a smartphone where it's permissible, are the culprits more