Perspectives on a DNS-CERT

Last week at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, a plan was announced by ICANN staff to create a "CERT" for DNS. That's a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) for the global Domain Name System (DNS). There are all kinds of CERTs in the world today, both inside and outside the Internet industry. There isn't one for DNS, and that's basically my fault, and so I have been following the developments in Nairobi this week very closely. more»

Another One (Partially) Bites the Dust

Following in the footsteps of Lethic, Waledac and Mariposa, yet another botnet has been taken offline. Not completely, though, it was only a partial disconnect. The Zeus botnet, also known as Zbot, is a trojan password stealer that captures passwords and sends them to the attacker. more»

Authorities Take Down the Mariposa Botnet

There are a number of sources talking about the takedown of the Mariposa botnet... Spanish authorities, working with researchers from Panda Labs, Defence Intelligence and a couple of other educational institutions, took down the Mariposa botnet (Mariposa is the Spanish word for "butterfly"). The Mariposa botnet is an absolutely enormous with around 12 million (!) nodes doing its bidding. It was involved in things like credit card phishing and identity fraud. more»

Closing in on the Google Hackers

Joseph Menn has an article on CNN.com wherein the crux of the story is that US experts are closing in on the hackers that broke into Google last month. It is believed by some that the Chinese government sponsored these hackers. China, naturally, denied involvement. My own take is that tools today are sophisticated enough such that you don't necessarily need state sponsorship in order to launch a cyber attack. more»

OpenDNS Adopts Proposed DNS Security Solution: DNSCurve

For more than 15 years, the IETF has been working on DNSSEC, a set of extensions to apply digital signatures to DNS. Millions of dollars in government grants and several reboots from scratch later, DNSSEC is just starting to see real world testing. And that testing is minimal -- only about 400 of the more than 85,000,000 .com domains support DNSSEC, fewer than 20% of US government agencies met their mandated December 31, 2009 deadline for DNSSEC deployment, and only two of the thirteen root zone name servers is testing with even dummy DNSSEC data. more»

Chuck Norris Botnet and Broadband Routers

Last week Czech researchers released information on a new worm which exploits CPE devices (broadband routers) by means such as default passwords, constructing a large DDoS botnet. Today this story hit international news... The spread of insecure broadband modems (DSL and Cable) is extremely wide-spread, with numerous ISPs, large and small, whose entire (read significant portions of) broadband population is vulnerable. more»

Domain Registry Locking Program: It Is There for a Reason, So Why Not Use It?

At the beginning of last year, MarkMonitor participated in VeriSign's beta program to test server-level protections which were designed to mitigate the potential for unintended domain name changes, deletions and transfers. When VeriSign finally released their Registry Locking Program to all registrars, I expected to see the owners of highly trafficked sites flocking to this new offering. However, after a review of the top 300 most highly trafficked sites, I was shocked to uncover that less than 10% of these valuable domains were protected using these newly available security measures. more»

Project Title: Adopt-an-Haitian-Internet-Technician-or-Facility

I circulated this, and its precursors, notes about the necessity for diesel to keep the generators powering Boutilliers Hill NAP on the Hatian-Dominican Republic Border from failing, earlier this month on the North American Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list. Efforts by former ICANN people, in public service and in the private sector, were critical to bringing the continuity of the surviving infrastructure to the attention of the White House, the Department of State, and the Southern Command. more»

A Dangerous Buzz, and Opt-In Isn't Just for Email

Google is great at generating buzz, and they've done it again with their new social vitality tool, appropriately named Google Buzz. Buzz takes all of your Gmail contacts (and presumably other connections from elsewhere within the Googleplex), and makes them all your "friends" by default; it then shares your activity from Google Reader, YouTube, and other tools with all of them, and vice versa... more»

DNS Resolvers and DNSSEC: Roll Over and Die?

Security is great when all the green lights are shining brightly and everything validates as intended, but what happens when you encounter failure? In this work we examine the behaviour of the DNS when security, in the form of DNSSEC is added, and we look at what happens when things do not happen as intended. What triggered this examination was a sudden increase in the traffic generated by secondary servers for the in-addr.arpa reverse zones in December 2009. more»