Email communication in the Marshall Islands was paralysed Tuesday after hackers launched a "zombie" computer attack on the western Pacific nation's only Internet service provider, AFP reports. The attack started early Tuesday, in which hackers used zombie computers to flood country's only Internet service provider with spam emails, causing a complete shutdown of email traffic into the nation of around 55,000 people. more»
Since 2000, the volume of Internet traffic on VeriSign's global infrastructure has increased from an average of 1 billion domain name system queries per day to a peak of more than 50 billion DNS queries per day under normal traffic conditions, reports VeriSign in a press release today. Under Project Titan, VeriSign reports it will increase its daily DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day and will increase the aggregate network bandwidth of its primary resolution centers around the world from more than 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps per second. VeriSign also plans to expand its deployment of Regional Internet Resolution Sites to more than 100 locations across the globe by 2010. Plans also include deploying new proprietary security upgrades and monitoring tools to identify, track and isolate malicious Internet traffic generated from cyber attacks. 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»
DNS records of one of the most popular photo sharing websites, Photobucket, were hacked yesterday by Turkish Hacking Group. The site returned a hacked page courtesy of the NetDevilz hacking group, a Turkish web site defacement group most widely known for its defacement of the adult video site Redtube earlier this year. Photobucket users across the world are reporting minor outages of the service and problems when trying to access their accounts, the consequence of what looks like the type of DNS records hijacking that redirected Comcast.net to a third-party domain last month. more»
I was pointed to an article in the Armed Forces Journal where Col Charles W. Williamson III argues that the US Air Force needs to develop a BOTnet army as part of the US military capability for retaliatory strikes. The article brings up some interesting issues, the one that I believe carries the most weight is the argument that we (well, people living on the Internet) are seeing an arms race. It is true that more and more nations are looking into or developing various forms of offensive weapons systems for the use on the Internet... more»
Internet attackers could gain control of water treatment plants, natural gas pipelines and other critical utilities because of a vulnerability in the software that runs some of those facilities, security researchers reported Wednesday. Experts with Boston-based Core Security Technologies, who discovered the deficiency, said there's no evidence anyone else found or exploited the flaw. Citect Pty. Ltd., which makes the program called CitectSCADA, patched the hole last week, five months after Core Security first notified Citect of the problem. more»
About a year ago after coming back from Estonia, I promised I'd send in an account of the Estonian "war". A few months ago I wrote an article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, covering the story of what happened there. This is the "war" that made politicians aware of cyber security and entire countries scared, NATO to "respond" and the US to send in "help". It deserved a better understanding for that alone, whatever actually happened there. more»
DNS server problems at the U.S. National Security Agency have knocked the secretive intelligence agency site offline for several hours. Reports suggest various possible reasons including an internal routing problem of some sort on their side or errors in firewall or ACL [access control list] policy. Other possibilities are speculated to be a technical glitch or a hacking incident. The NSA is responsible for analysis of foreign communications, but it is also charged with helping protect the U.S. government against cyber attacks -- the outage is an embarrassment for the agency. more»
Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN and member of the British-North American Committee, advises chief executives of the risks to business from cyber-espionage and how to deal with them... "There are reports of cyber-espionage against the US defense industry and the UK by China," said Twomey on Wednesday. more»
Seven NATO nations gave their backing on Wednesday to a new cyber defense centre in Estonia, the ex-Soviet state which last year faced weeks of attacks on its Internet structure after a row with Russia. Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain agreed to help fund and staff the centre in the Estonian capital Tallinn. The United States will initially send an observer to the project, aimed at boosting defenses against such attacks. more»
According to a recent security report, the number of phishing attacks on financial services customers has increased dramatically this year, with fraudsters focusing on three banks whose customers they have judged to be particularly vulnerable. Just as phishing seemed to have slipped off the consumer radar, online fraudsters have leapt on the chance to capitalize on this false sense of security and have increased their phishing activity... more»
Every now and then I get emails from readers of my blog. I mostly reply to them in private, but I recently got one question where I thought my reply might be of general interest. I took the liberty of editing the question somewhat, but in essence it was: "If you have any insight you can share with my class on cyber warfare and security, I would be delighted on hearing it." In general, I think that it's an obvious conclusion that both offensive and defensive actions with regard to national telecommunications infrastructure is becoming an integral part of a nations security assessments.... more»
A cyberattack has caused a power blackout in multiple cities outside the United States, the CIA has warned. The SANS Institute, a computer-security training body, reported the CIA's disclosure on Friday. CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue told a SANS Institute conference on Wednesday in New Orleans that the CIA had evidence of successful cyberattacks against critical national infrastructures outside the United States. more»
Increasingly-intense distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on ISP backbones are surpassing providers' capacity and knocking customers offline, according to a new survey of service providers by Arbor Networks. While most large ISPs have upgraded their backbones to 10-Gbit/s speeds over the past two years, three respondents said they have experienced sustained attacks from 20- to 22 Gbit/s, and one hosting services provider in the survey reported a 24-Gbit/s DNS-targeted attack. The most powerful sustained attack previously was 17 Gbit/s, which was reported in last year's survey by Arbor. more»
BBC News is running Vint Cerf's personal view on the Internet's future. From the article: "Improving the resilience and resistance to attack of key infrastructure such as the Domain Name System (the phone book of the internet) and the routing system will be major focal points for near-term internet development. Introducing DNSSEC (security for the Domain Name System) and the digital signing of address space by the Regional Internet Registries will assume much higher priority..." more»
