Lithuania Attacked by Russian Hacktivists, 300 Sites Defaced

Last week's mass defacement of over 300 Lithuanian sites hosted on the same ISP, an upcoming attack that was largely anticipated due to the on purposely escalated online tensions out of Lithuan's accepted legislation banning communist symbols across the country, once again demonstrates information warfare building capabilities in action. Moreover, the attack is again relying on common prerequisites for a successful information warfare campaign, used in the Russia vs. Estonia cyberattack last year. These very same Internet PSYOPS tactics ensure the success of the information warfare as a whole... more»

Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies?

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not? Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft. But consider this... more»

Domain Registrars Releasing Suspended Domains to Attackers

Mary Landesman of ScanSafe reports: "A new outbreak of SQL attacks began on the 8th. Not that they ever really go away, but new waves replace the old ones. The attackers are using a much larger number of domains than seen in previous months. Just 11 days into June, and already 54 of these domains have been observed. Many of these are previously suspended domains that registrars have released back to the attackers. more»

.hk the "Most Unsafe" Domains?

Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine's top stories list. But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published. McAfee's study seems to be based on a year's worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk ccTLD. These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards... more»

Revision3 and Media Defender

Lots of coverage in the last two days about a Memorial Day weekend attack that took down the servers of Revision3, an Internet video network. This story has a lot of ingredients -- P2P maneuvering, DDoS attack, copyright vs. piracy, talk of laws broken and the FBI investigating. What's the CircleID take? Revision3's description. more»

Do We Need Two Internets?

Jonathan Zittrain's recent book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination. The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today's global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression... One of the reasons that Zittrain puts forward for the growing popularity of closed or, as he prefers 'tethered', devices, is that they are less vulnerable to hacking, security flaws, malware and all the other perils that face any internet-enabled system. more»

Comcast Domain Name Hacked, Website Breached for Several Hours

Shortly before 11 p.m. EDT yesterday, Comcast users began noticing that Comcast.net had been hacked. More technically, early indications are that someone hacked Comcast's registrar account at Network Solutions, changing the authoritative DNS servers for Comcast.net -- rerouting portal visitors to IP addresses in Germany or elsewhere. The front page of Comcast.net was replaced with a note saying the hackers had "RoXed" Comcast, according to postings at BroadbandReports.com. 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»

Escalating Attacks on U.S. Military Networks Linked to China

Numerous hacks from the Far East sure look like concerted attacks against U.S. military installations, but nobody's saying for sure... A Wall Street Journal article March 12 described how military networks are increasingly the targets of hackers. The targets are not limited to actual Department of Defense networks, but can also include defense industries and think tanks. more»

Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History

With Google's recent Postini addition, it now reports to be processing email for more than 35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and blocking around 1 billion messages per day... "We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47 billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a lot of spam). The average unprotected email user would have received 32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam can cost a company up to $742 per user." more»

DNSSEC: Once More, With Feeling!

After looking at the state of DNSSEC in some detail a little over a year ago in 2006, I've been intending to come back to DNSSEC to see if anything has changed, for better or worse, in the intervening period... To recap, DNSSEC is an approach to adding some "security" into the DNS. The underlying motivation here is that the DNS represents a rather obvious gaping hole in the overall security picture of the Internet, although it is by no means the only rather significant vulnerability in the entire system. One of the more effective methods of a convert attack in this space is to attack at the level of the DNS by inserting fake responses in place of the actual DNS response. more»

68,000 Open Recursive DNS Servers Behaving Maliciously; "This is a crime with few witnesses"

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»

Hackers Spreading Malicious Code Using Typosquatted Domains

Finjan Inc., a web security company, has released reports today on hackers and cyber-criminals using typosquatted domain names to infect visitors to legitimate websites and increase the lifecycle of cyber-attacks. Leveraging the similarity to legitimate and frequently used domain names is successfully enabling these attackers to go unnoticed by webmasters and security solution providers. more»

US Homeland Security Wants Control Over DNS

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the attacks on September 11, 2001 as a kind of overriding department, wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government... During the current ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone's attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs). more»

Where are DNS Root Servers? See them on Google Maps

DNS root servers function as part of the Internet backbone, as explained in Wikipedia, and have come under attack a number of times in the past -- although none of the attacks have ever been serious enough to severely hamper the performance of the Internet. In response to some of the common misconceptions about the physical location and total number of DNS root servers in the world, Patrik Faltstrom has put together a visual map on Google, pin-pointing the approximate location of each server around the world. more»