IPv6 represents new territory for most Internet stakeholders, and its rollout will introduce some unique security challenges.
Anti-spam and malware enforcement agency ACMA reports on this (shocking high?) figure. Keep this up and ca. 50% of the Australian population is infected within a year. I remember a presentation from Sweden only a few years ago, that there were only a little over a thousand infected pc's in Sweden. (Reactions were: that can't be correct. Too low) Do you know what the numbers are for your country and maybe more importantly what your government and/or Industry is/are doing about it? more»
In the world of DNS, there are two types of DNS servers, 'recursion disabled' and 'recursion enabled'. Recursion disabled servers, when asked to resolve a name, will only answer for names that they are authoritative for. It will absolutely refuse to look up a name it does not have authority over and is ideal for when you don't want it to serve just any query. It isn't, however, very useful for domains you don't know about or have authority over... more»
I came across an interesting article on Reuters today: "U.S. securities regulators formally asked public companies for the first time to disclose cyber attacks against them, following a rash of high-profile Internet crimes..." This is a pretty big step for the SEC. Requiring companies to disclose when they have been hacked shifts the action on corporations from something voluntary to something that they have to do. The question is do we want to hear about everything? more»
A Romanian hacker site said on Wednesday it was able to breach the website of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure just as it had gained access to the sites of two other security companies earlier in the week. F-Secure is "vulnerable to SQL Injection plus Cross Site Scripting," an entry on the HackersBlog site said. "Fortunately, F-Secure doesn't leak sensitive data, just some statistics regarding past virus activity." more»
With IPv6 World Launch coming up it's worth pausing to consider the collective efforts of the Internet industry in enabling and deploying an essential evolutionary technology at what will become truly massive scale. It's easy to be a detractor and believe there has been little progress -- but the Internet hasn't melted down and there is no evidence it is about to. Perhaps the issue is that progress occurred in a different way than was predicted or preferred by the experts. more»
ICANN has appointed IID President and CTO Rod Rasmussen to its Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). An area that Rasmussen's work and recent SSAC reports have both covered in-depth is domain name hijacking. Recent hijackings against UFC.com and Coach.com, and similar past attacks against CheckFree, Comcast and Twitter have heightened awareness about the security dangers with the Internet's infrastructure. more»
China is actively conducting cyber espionage as a warfare strategy and has targeted U.S. government and commercial computers, according to a new report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. "China's current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts," according to the annual report recently delivered to Congress. more»
Small- and medium-sized businesses are in denial about the threat posed by cyberattacks, security software firm McAfee concluded in a study published this week. While most small- and medium-sized companies believe that they operate under cybercriminals' radar, the study found that one-in-five firms have been attacked. The survey -- which polled 500 companies with 1,000 employees or less -- found that for every eight firms, only ten employees were dedicated to managing the businesses' information-technology systems. more»
DNSSEC continues to gain momentum as network operators and domain owners watch and learn from early adopters. The learning process is made easier by efforts such as the ongoing work conducted by researchers at Sandia labs to methodically identify and categorize the kinds of problems that are occurring. more»
Only two years after signing the DNS root zone, the powerful lure of a secure global infrastructure for data distribution is starting to reveal itself. It is illustrated clearly by two proposed technical standardizations that seek to leverage secure DNS. To some degree these developments highlight the strength of DNS institutions and how they might fill gaps elsewhere in the Internet's governance. But an increasing reliance upon and concentration of power in the DNS also makes getting its global governance correct even more important. more»
Phil Reitinger, the Department of Homeland Security's top cyber and computer crimes official, is resigning just days after the administration launched its most ambitious cybersecurity initiative. "I have decided that the time has come for me to move on from the Department," Reitinger wrote in an e-mail to DHS employees this afternoon. more»
Mobile networks aren't usually thought of as sources of spam, but a quick look at some of the resources that track spam reveals they actually are. This is counter intuitive at first glance because when most people think of mobile they think of smartphones, and those aren't known to be sources of spam (at least not yet). What's really going on is PCs connected to mobile networks with air cards, or tethered with a smartphone where it's permissible, are the culprits more»
The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) has announced the award of a contract for upgrading the NATO cyber defence capabilities. The award to private industrial companies will enable the already operating NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC) to achieve full operational capability by the end of 2012. At approximately 58 million Euro, it represents NATO's largest investment to date in cyber defence. more»
Iran's nuclear facilities are immune to cyber attack a senior Iranian military official has claimed today according to various reports. "Gholam Reza Jalali, who heads an Iranian military unit in charge of combatting sabotage, was quoted Monday by the official IRNA news agency as saying that Iran and its nuclear facilities possess the technology and knowledge to deal with malicious software." more»
In a report on Washington Post's Security Fix, Brian Krebs writes: "Some of the most prolific and recognizable malware disbursed by Russian and East European cyber crime groups purposefully avoids infecting computers if the program detects the potential victim is a native resident. But evidence from the Conficker worm -- which by some estimates is infecting more than one million new PCs each day -- shows that trend may be shifting." Based on an analysis by Microsoft experts, the original version of the Downadup (also known as "Conficker") worm will not install if the malware detects the host system is configured with a Ukrainian keyboard layout. However, the latest variant has no such restriction. more»
