Security watchers are calling on net governance body ICANN to adopt a new top level domain name to be used exclusively by registered banks and financial organisations.
If ICANN introduced a .safe domain (or .sure or .bank), which could only be used by registered financial institutions, it would allow security providers to create better software to protect the public. more»
The same Turkish Hacking Group, NetDevilz, responsible for the hacking and defacement of the popular photo sharing site, Photobucket, has been reported to have briefly succeeded in accessing ICANN and IANA domain names yesterday, June 26, 2008, and redirecting them to a page containing the message: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"... more»
Reported today: "Researchers at Google Inc. and the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying a virtually undetectable form of attack that quietly controls where victims go on the Internet." The Georgia Tech and Google researchers estimate that as many as 0.4%, or 68,000, open-recursive DNS servers are behaving maliciously, returning false answers to DNS queries. Unlike other DNS servers, open-recursive systems will answer all DNS lookup requests from any computer on the Internet, a feature that makes them particularly useful for hackers. They also estimate that another 2% of them provide questionable results. more»
The Whois database may disappear... An ICANN committee is considering a sunset proposal at its meeting this week in Los Angeles that would effectively scrap the directory system on privacy grounds. Among those arguments is that a public-by-default Whois listing may run afoul of Canadian and European Union privacy laws. more»
Sources indicate former director of the US Homeland Security Department's National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), Rod Beckstrom, will be replacing the current ICANN CEO, Paul Twomey, who announced his resignation earlier this year. Milton Mueller in a blog post on the IGP website writes: "This is still unconfirmed by ICANN but comes from well-informed sources. We also hear that David Eisner, the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service under G.W. Bush and former VP at AOL, was also in the running." Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to "rule over" the NCSC. more»
Jaikumar Vijayan reporting in InfoWorld: "Microsoft has agreed to pay $7.5 million to purchase a block of 666,624 IPv4 addresses from bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment maker Nortel in a move that some see as a signal of the increasing value of IPv4 addresses. Last week, Nortel filed a motion seeking approval for the sale from the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. If the deal is approved, Microsoft would assume control of the IPv4 addresses, currently owned by Nortel, for about $11.25 a piece." more»
During a presentation at the Interop Conference currently ongoing in Los Vegas, Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google, informed the audience that a new cloud storage service will be rolled out by Google within weeks. The role out is part of Google's expansion of its AppEngine platform which is said to offer similar security infrastructure as Gmail and Google Apps. "[T]he app partitioning and isolation are the same best of breed technology approaches that Google is developing for the rest of its customer base," Repass said. more»
The growing popularity of smartphones, IPTV and other gadgets connecting to the Internet is eating up real estate on the net, and soon techies can expect cyberspace to run out of room, according to a Frost & Sullivan analyst briefing Thursday.
Experts say today's Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) also limits services of multimedia content and data communication, including mobile IP, P2P and video calls. With new mobile IPv6, telecommunication providers can easily roll out custom services from movies to ring tones to television. more»
A Los Angeles firm today announced a federal class action lawsuit against Network Solutions (NSI) and ICANN over the NSI's practice of locking up domain names as soon as they are searched for on its website, which means the party searching can buy the name only from Network Solutions. more»
As warned by Dan Kaminsky, Paul Vixie, and numerous other experts experts, it was just a matter of time before an exploit code for the now public DNS flaw would surface. An exploit code for the flaw allowing insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of target nameservers has been posted to Metasploit, a free provider of information and tools on exploit techniques. According to reports Metasploit creator, H D Moore in collaboration with a researcher named "|)ruid" from Computer Academic Underground, created the exploit, dubbed "DNS BaliWicked Attack", along with a DNS service created to assist with the exploit. more»
Iran's political filtering during the recent 2009 presidential campaign and the role of the Internet in the post-election turmoil has brought a heightened level of attention to the country's Internet filtering system. According to a status report just updated by the OpenNet Initiative, the Internet censorship system in Iran has become one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world. Iran and China are the only countries that aggressively filter the Internet using their own technology. Iran's aggressive filtering measures "have contributed to the implementation of a centralized filtering strategy and a reduced reliance on Western technologies," says OpenNet. more»
The company that manages the .name top-level domain registry is charging for access to domain registration information (Whois data), a step that security researchers say frustrates their ability to police the Internet and creates a haven for hackers who run internet scams. more»
The performance of registrars in decommissioning domain names connected to fraud scams is all over the map. A "brandjacking" report released last month by MarkMonitor is the first to include a list of the top 10 best and worst lists of registrar performance in revoking domain names connected to phishing scams. more»
During its board meeting today in Sydney, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced Rod Beckstrom, the former U.S. cybersecurity chief, as the new President and CEO. Beckstrom will be replacing Dr. Paul Twomey who had been serving this position since March 2003 and announced his resignation earlier this year. Dr Twomey has lately been reported as the primary candidate for heading Australian Government's proposed A$43 billion investment in a new National Broadband Network. more»
Enum, or Telephone Number Mapping, aims to do for phone numbers of any kind what the Domain Name System did for the World Wide Web. BBC is reporting that UK's Enum directory has begun and it will be run by Nominet -- the administrator of the .uk top-level domain. more»
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