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In part 1, I talked about some of the risks associated with BYOD. But there are actions you can take to greatly reduce this risk. One effective method for limiting the risk of BYOD is to employ DNS-based security intelligence techniques. DNS-based security intelligence makes use of an enterprise's caching DNS server to monitor and block DNS queries to known botnet command and control (C&C) domains. more»
Five leading IT vendors have announced the creation of the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI), a nonprofit organization that intends to let vendors and customers work together on global IT security threats and resolve them in a government-neutral way. ICASI's founding members include, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper and Microsoft. ICASI will target "global, multivendor cyber threats" to reduce their impact on end users. The group's statement says these attacks target multiple products or protocols in products, giving them a broader impact. These attacks pose problems not only for end user customers, but also for vendors, the group says. more»
In a blog post, Stewart Baker proposed restricting access to sophisticated anti-virus software as a way to limit the development of sophisticated malware. It won't work, for many different and independent reasons. To understand why, though, it's necessary to understand how AV programs work. The most important technology used today is the "signature" - a set of patterns of bytes - of each virus. Every commercial AV program on the market operates on a subscription model... more»
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced major military reforms involving an in-depth change in strategic priorities and is gradually preparing France for the fights of future. Plans include expanding the range of weapons arsenal in terms of computer warfare, said the president in his announcement this week. France is not alone to be deeply worried about the issue of crippling cyber attacks. In mid-May, the Atlantic Alliance, which brings together dozens of Northern America, Western and Eastern European countries, launched what has come to be known as the "NATO Excellence Center for Cybernetics Defense" in Tallinn, Estonia. more»
Throughout the second half of 2012 many security folks have been asking "how much is a zero-day vulnerability worth?" and it's often been hard to believe the numbers that have been (and continue to be) thrown around. For the sake of clarity though, I do believe that it's the wrong question... the correct question should be "how much do people pay for working exploits against zero-day vulnerabilities?" more»
We recently analyzed the reputation of a country's Internet (IPv4) addresses by examining the number of blacklisted IPv4 addresses that geolocate to a given country. We compared this indicator with two qualitative measures of each country's governance. We hypothesized that countries with more transparent, democratic governmental institutions would harbor a smaller fraction of misbehaving (blacklisted) hosts. The available data confirms this hypothesis. A similar correlation exists between perceived corruption and fraction of blacklisted IP addresses. more»
The King is dead. Long live the King! Or, given this week's events, should the phrase now be "Kelihos is dead. Long live Kelihos"? It is with a little amusement and a lot of cynicism that I've been watching the kerfuffle relating to the latest attempt to take down the Kelihos botnet. You may remember that a similar event ("Kelihos is dead") occurred late last year after Microsoft and Kaspersky took it on themselves to shut down the botnet known as Kelihos (or sometimes as Waledac 2.0 or Hlux). more»
Neil Schwartzman writes to report that U.S. Cert issued Alert TA13-088A on Friday March 29, 2013. "It is a solid how-to guide to test for, and remediate DNS configurations that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks." more»
Robert O'Harrow of the Washington Post reporting: "Everybody knows by now that cyber security is something of an annoyance, if not a big deal... What most of us fail to appreciate is how big a deal all this really is. That's one of the subtexts of a new report from congressional researchers [PDF] that came Government Inc.'s way. Going by the dry title 'Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative: Legal Authorities and Policy Considerations,' the report underscores in a compelling way the fact that the nation's cyber vulnerabilities continue to grow, and fast." more»
Hackers have launched distributed denial of service attacks against the Domain Name System (DNS) servers of a brace of domain name registrars over recent days. The motive for the separate attacks against VeriSign and Joker.com remains unclear.
VeriSign said the attack on its name servers caused a "brief degradation" in the quality of its service to customers for around 25 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, ComputerWorld reports. Domain registrar Joker.com is recovering from an attack on its name servers last week that lasted for six days up until last Sunday. Joker.com, which is based in Germany, handles the registration of approximately 550,000 domains. more»
China has been accused of sponsoring cyber attacks at the International Crime Science Conference held in London, UK recently. Security expert, John Walker, CTO of forensics consultancy Secure-Bastion, said that the Chinese government was behind the 'Titan Rain' attacks on the US and the UK. Titan Rain is codename given by the U.S. government to a series of coordinated attacks on American computer systems where hackers gained access to many U.S. computer networks, including NASA. The attacks were identified as being Chinese in origin, however the Chinese government has not been officially accused of being behind the assault. more»
China and the United States will set up a working group on cybersecurity, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday, as the two sides moved to ease months of tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and Internet theft. Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a visit to China, Kerry said the United States and China had agreed on the need to speed up action on cyber security, an area that Washington says is its top national security concern. more»
While Russia and Ukraine are generally regarded as today's main cybercrime hubs, "a lot of their infrastructure is housed in the west, in the United States to be precise," writes Vincent Hanna of Spamhaus Project. "Without exception, all of the major security organizations on the Internet we know of agree that the 'Home' of cybercrime in the western world is a place known as Atrivo/Intercage. We ourselves have not come to this conclusion lightly but from many years of dealing with criminal operations hosted by Atrivo/Intercage, gangs of cybercriminals -- mostly Russian and East European but with several US online crime gangs as well -- whose activities always lead back to servers run by Atrivo/Intercage..." more»
According to reports today, hackers have attacked Palestinian servers, cutting off phone and Internet service across the West Bank and Gaza. Foreign governments are accused to be behind the attack. "Since this morning all Palestinian IP addresses have come under attack from places across the world," said the Palestinian communications minister today. Reneys reports these outages are the largest observed all year for this country, which normally has a fairly stable Internet. more»
According to reports, North Korea has accused the United States for conducting a cyberattack that has disrupted Internet connectivity in the country. "While the details of the cause of the disruption are unknown, we can confirm that in the last two days, North Korea's sole Internet provider has, in fact, suffered from disruptions in connectivity to the global Internet," reports Doug Madory from Renesys. more»
