Threat Intelligence

Experts Propose Plan for More Secure Wi-Fi Devices

Over 260 global network and security experts have collectively responded to the newly proposed FCC rules laid out in ET Docket No. 15-170 for RF Devices such as Wi-Fi routers by proposing a new approach to improve the security of these devices. The letter warns FCC ruling will cause more harm than good and risk a significant overreach of the Commission's authority. more

Why More Registries Should Be Talking About DNS Security

I've been incredibly lucky in my time at Neustar to lead both the exceptional Registry and Security teams. While these divisions handle their own unique product and service offerings, it's clear that they have some obvious crossovers in their risks, opportunities and challenges. Having been closely involved in the strategy of both these teams, it strikes me that there is more we as Registry Operators and service providers can and should be doing to align the world of cybersecurity with that of domain names. more

Phishing Attack: An Open Letter to the Anti-Spam and Mailbox Operator Community

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Return Path was recently a victim of this same attack... In short, a relatively small list of our clients' email addresses was taken from us, meaning those addresses are now the targets of the phishing campaign that are intended to compromise those client systems. more

Threat Intelligence in Latter 2019: Overcoming the Same and New Challenges

Does threat intelligence (TI) work? I looked into that question last year, exploring the reasons why it actually doesn't and what can be done to remediate the situation. Since then, more companies have incorporated TI into their security processes, and many are still not getting the benefits they expect. What's causing the dissatisfaction? Interestingly, pretty much the same aspects... more

U.S. Cyber Security: Blurred Vision

It has been beaten, butted, and batted around quite a bit in the past few weeks -- let's look at a rough timeline of political issues which bring me to this point. Let's look at the power struggle (I prefer to call it confusion) in the U.S. Government with regards to "Cyber Security" -- in a nutshell. In the latter part of 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee determined that DHS was not capable of providing proper critical infrastructure protection (and other Cyber protection capabilities) due to a number of issues. This may well be a political maneuver, or it may well actually have merit. more

Poland to Test a Cybersecurity Program for Aviation Sector

During the two-day Cybersecurity in Civil Aviation conference, Poland announced an agreement to test a cybersecurity pilot program for the aviation sector as Europe's European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) civil aviation authority face increasing threats posed by hackers to air traffic. more

NTIA Releases Cybersecurity Road Map for “Building a More Resilient Internet”

U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security have released a road map setting out steps to stop the cyber threat to nations internet infrastructure, announced NTIA. more

Can We Really Blame DNSSEC for Larger-Volume DDoS attacks?

In its security bulletin, Akamai's Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT) reported on abuse of DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) when mounting a volumetric reflection-amplification attack. This is not news, but I'll use this opportunity to talk a bit about whether there is a trade-off between the increased security provided by DNSSEC and increased size of DNS responses that can be leveraged by the attackers. more

Registry Lock - or EPP With Two Factor Authentication

For the last couple of years, the most common attack vector against the DNS system is the attack against the registrar. Either the attack is on the software itself using weaknesses in the code that could inject DNS changes into the TLD registry, or social engineering the registrar support systems and the attacker receives credentials that in turn allows the attacker to perform malicious changes in DNS. DNSSEC is the common security mechanism that protects the DNS protocol, but by using the registrar attack, any changes will result in a proper working DNS delegation. more

Google Reveals Top 10 Malware Sites From Its Index

While scanning its index, Google in the last two months reports to have found more than 4,000 different websites suspected of distributing malware by massively compromising popular websites. "Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc.," says Google's security team member, Niels Provos, in a blog post today. more

Pentagon Reveals Largest Ever Loss of Defense Data in Cyberattack

The Associated Press published an article today that the Pentagon revealed that earlier this year, they suffered one of its largest ever loss of sensitive data to a foreign government by a cyberattack. ... It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong. On the one hand, the Secretary of Defense says that the cyberwar is very real. On the other hand, the cyberczar Howard Schmidt said that there is no cyberwar and instead government needs to focus its efforts to fight online crime and espionage... more

CNN.Com, Politically Motivated DDoS, and Asymmetric Warfare

Once again I find myself thinking about the nature of the asymmetric warfare threat posed by politically motivated DDoS (Estonia in 07, Korea in 02, and now China vs. CNN in 08). I keep thinking about it in terms of asymmetric warfare, a class of warfare where one side is a traditional, centrally managed military with superior uniformed numbers, weaponry, and skill. On the other we have smaller numbers, usually untrained fighters with meager weapons, and usually a smaller force. Historical examples include the North Vietnamese in the 20th century and even the American Revolution in the 18th century. Clearly this can be an effective strategy for a band of irregulars... more

Bridging the Gaps: MAAWG, IETF, and BITS Establish Formal Relationships

As announced this morning, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has established formal relationships with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the BITS/Financial Services Roundtable... It's often said that there are too many different organizations working on the overlapping areas of abuse, trust, and related issues. I believe the collaborative approach MAAWG has chosen will bridge these gaps. more

Cutting Through the Twitter DDoS Hype

There are a lot of theories flying around about why Twitter and other social media services got knocked offline yesterday. I've heard rumors about it being linked to political tension between Georgia and Russia. Others blame Iran for the outages. I'm not a political commentator, therefore I cannot comment on anyone's political views -- but I have some logic and common sense, and I can draw some objective conclusions. more

Symantec Acquires VeriSign’s Security Business for $1.28 Billion

Symantec today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VeriSign's identity and authentication business, which includes the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the VeriSign Trust Services and the VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service. more