domains
News
Six Largest ISPs in UK Agree to Send Warning Letters to Illegal Music, Movie DownloadersThe music and film industries have launched a fight back against online piracy today, persuading Britain's six biggest Internet providers, BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse, to send warning letters to those suspected of illegal file-sharing. The plan is aimed at an estimated 6.5 million Britons who have downloaded files illegally over the past year. ISPs had previously argued they were mere conduits and not responsible for content. But they agreed to the deal after the government said it would impose legislation if they did not work to curb illegal file-sharing. More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 19:18
Email Hacking Going Commercial
This email hacking as a service offering is the direct result of the public release of a do it yourself hacking kit consisting of each and every publicly known vulnerability for a variety of web based email service providers, with the idea to make it easier for someone to execute their attacks more efficiently. Outsource the hacking of someone's email, and receive a proof in the form of a screenshot of the inbox, next to a guarantee that you'll be able to get back in even after they've changed their passwords? Too good to be true, but since they only charge after they provide you with a proof that they did the job, they could be in fact attempting to hack these emails, compared to the majority of cases where scammers scam the scammers. More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 18:50
Cablecos, Telcos Childish Behavior Harmful to National Interest, Says Vint Cerft
Vint Cerf has blasted telephone and cable companies for harming national interests by holding investments in their networks to ransom. A long-time advocate of keeping the internet free from control by service providers, Cerf, a current senior vice-president for search giant Google Inc., told the Silicon Valley Watcher blog that the companies are being childish by threatening to withhold upgrading networks unless they get breaks from regulators. More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 07:39
Google Talks About Owning Your Internet Connection
Derek Slater, Google's policy analyst, is asking "What if you could own your own Internet connection?" In other words, proposing a very different model where residentials, businesses, or other institutions would pay for the installation and maintenance of their own "last mile" link to the Internet, thus improving broadband reliability and choice. Although the idea may seem far fetched, Slater points out that in Ottawa, Canada, a trial experiment is already underway trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes... More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 03:15
DNS Attack Code Has Been Published
As warned by Dan Kaminsky, Paul Vixie, and numerous other experts experts, it was just a matter of time before an exploit code for the now public DNS flaw would surface. An exploit code for the flaw allowing insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of target nameservers has been posted to Metasploit, a free provider of information and tools on exploit techniques. According to reports Metasploit creator, H D Moore in collaboration with a researcher named "|)ruid" from Computer Academic Underground, created the exploit, dubbed "DNS BaliWicked Attack", along with a DNS service created to assist with the exploit. More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 01:19
Buzz About Mobile WiMax Heating Up
The buzz from vendors and carriers about the broadband wireless technology called mobile WiMAX is heating up, fueled by new chipsets and radio products and fanned by some huge carrier investments, reports Network World. "Clearwire in the summer rounded up $900 million, including $600 million from WiMAX zealot Intel, to upgrade its growing wireless broadband net to support the IEEE's 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. And Sprint Nextel in August became the first U.S. cellular provider to announce plans to deploy a nationwide mobile WiMAX net in the licensed 2.5GHz frequency band." More...
Source : circleid.com | 24-Jul-2008 00:50
NeuStar Names Alex Berry Head of Internet Infrastructure Services Group
NeuStar, Inc. today announced that it has appointed Alex Berry as senior vice president and general manager of NeuStar's Internet Infrastructure Services group, which includes domain name registry services as well as the UltraDNS and Webmetrics service lines. More...
Source : circleid.com | 23-Jul-2008 22:46
Moniker.com Announces Domain Name Inventory for the Upcoming Online Auction at Affiliate Summit 2008
Moniker, an Oversee.net company and provider of Domain Asset Management; services, today announced the availability of premium domain names for purchase via its exclusive online domain name auction produced in association with the Affiliate Summit 2008 East, the largest event for affiliate marketers. More...
Source : circleid.com | 23-Jul-2008 22:35
Targeted Social Engineering Attacks Against Corporations Reach Record Levels
A recent report by iDefense Labs estimates that there have been 66 distinct spear phishing attacks between February 2007 and June 2008, with the rate of attacks continuing to accelerate. Spear phishing groups have claimed more than 15,000 corporate victims in 15 months, with victim losses exceeding $100,000 in some cases. Victims include Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and legal firms. More...
Source : circleid.com | 23-Jul-2008 19:01
Just a Matter of Time Before DNS Attack Code Might Surface
One day after a security company accidentally posted details of a serious flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), hackers are saying that software that exploits this flaw is sure to pop up soon. Several hackers are almost certainly already developing attack code for the bug, and it will most likely crop up within the next few days, says one security expert. The author of one widely used hacking tool said he expected to have an exploit by the end of the day Tuesday. More...
Source : circleid.com | 23-Jul-2008 06:46
Notorious Spam King Gets 4 Years in Prison
Robert Soloway, dubbed the "Spam King", who was charged with defrauding people through tens of millions of spam has been given four years in prison for mail fraud, electronic mail fraud, and failing to file a tax return. According to recent reports, federal prosecutors allege that from November 2003 to May 2007, Soloway sent tens of millions of email messages to advertise his company, which offered software to send out broadcast emails. For $495 customers could have an ad sent to 20,000,000 emails, or receive software allowing them to send up to 80,000,000 e-mails. Judge Marsha Pechman said laws governing Spam are very new territory for the courts, and the CAN-SPAM Act allows for only a maximum sentence of only five years. More...
Source : circleid.com | 23-Jul-2008 02:48
Shouting 'Bug' on a Crowded Internet?
In the last few weeks we've seen two very different approaches to the full disclosure of security flaws in large-scale computer systems. Problems in the domain name system have been kept quiet long enough for vendors to find and fix their software, while details of how to hack Transport for London's Oyster card will soon be available to anyone with a laptop computer and a desire to break the law. These two cases highlight a major problem facing the computing industry, one that goes back many years and is still far from being unresolved. Given that there are inevitably bugs, flaws and unexpected interactions in complex systems, how much information about them should be made public by researchers when the details could be helpful to criminals or malicious hackers? More...
Source : circleid.com | 22-Jul-2008 19:16
RegistryPro Confirms Melbourne IT to Join .Pro TLD Relaunch
RegistryPro, the exclusive operator of the .Pro top-level domain (TLD) on the Internet, has announced that Melbourne IT, one of the top 15 global domain name registrars, has agreed to participate in the highly-anticipated .Pro TLD (Top Level Domain) relaunch on September 8, 2008. More...
Source : circleid.com | 22-Jul-2008 18:18
DNS Security Flaw Secret Leaked Prior to Set Date: Patch DNS as Fast as Possible
In what seems to have started with a blog post by reverse engineer Halvar Flake, and subsequent blog postings from other experts in the know, the details of the recently announced DNS vulnerability was quite likely made public today. The DNS flaw was found earlier this year by security researcher Dan Kaminsky and earlier this month announced publicly along with various tools and patches provided by numerous vendors... More...
Source : circleid.com | 22-Jul-2008 04:32
Comcast Proposes Its IPv6 Transition Solution to IETF, Invites ISPs to Participate
Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., is reported to have developed an innovative approach for gradually migrating its customers to IPv6. The company has 24.7 million cable customers, 14.1 million broadband customers and 5.2 million voice customers. The solution dubbed Dual-Stack Lite, is backwards compatible with IPv4 and can be deployed incrementally according the company. Comcast has submitted this proposal to the Internet standards body, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which has scheduled a review during the upcoming IETF meeting in Dublin later this month. From the Comcast document submitted to IETF... More...
Source : circleid.com | 22-Jul-2008 02:29
.ORG Becomes the First Generic Top level Domain to Start DNSSEC Implementation
A request by .ORG, The Public Interest Registry to bolster Internet security via the implementation of Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC) was unanimously approved by ICANN at the recent Paris meeting. As the first generic Top Level Domain authorized to implement DNSSEC, .ORG also is preparing an education and adoption plan within the Internet infrastructure community. More...
Source : circleid.com | 22-Jul-2008 01:14
U.S. Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Single Largest Fund for 2009
Walter Pincus of The Washington Post is reporting that President Bush's single largest request for funds and "most important initiative" in the fiscal 2009 intelligence budget is for the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a little publicized but massive program whose details "remain vague and thus open to question," according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. CNCI or "Cyber Initiative" is a highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project designed to develop a plan to secure government computer systems against foreign and domestic intruders and prepare for future threats. "It is no longer sufficient for the U.S. Government to discover cyber intrusions in its networks, clean up the damage, and take legal or political steps to deter further intrusions," says Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. More...
Source : circleid.com | 21-Jul-2008 19:18
Amazon's S3 Cloud Service Goes Down for Several Hours
Amazon's S3 system, which provides a pay-as-you-use processing service, died briefly at the weekend, and with it went many services that had hung their hat on it -- such as the organize-your-business company 37Signals, image caching by Twitter, and many iPhone apps, reports Charles Arthur of the Guardian. One of the things that makes the online storage service, Amazon S3, particularly useful for start-ups and heavy users is that it ties in with other Amazon Web Services like the elastic computing cloud and its SimpleDB service. Using all three services relieves start-ups from some of the tasks that generally would require significant time and money up front. More...
Source : circleid.com | 21-Jul-2008 18:33
Website of Georgian President Under Attack, Political Motivation Suspected
For over 24 hours the website of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, has been down as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This attack appears to have a political motivation, says Jose Nazario of Arbor Neworks. "Tensions between Russia and Georgia appear to be running high lately." According to The Shadowserver Foundation, a security watchdog group, the site (www.president.gov.ge) began coming under attack very early Saturday morning (Georgian time). More...
Source : circleid.com | 21-Jul-2008 04:49
Many Systems Open to Attack Through Channels Enabled to Support IPv6 Traffic
It may be years before the new internet protocol IPv6 takes over from the current IPv4, but a security researcher is warning that many systems -- corporate and personal -- are already open to attack through channels that have been enabled on their machines to support IPv6 traffic, according to the Wired report by Kim Zetter. Joe Klein, a security researcher with Command Information, says many organizations and home users have IPv6 enabled on their systems by default but don't know it. They also don't have protection in place to block malicious traffic, since some intrusion detection systems and firewalls aren't set up to monitor IPv6 traffic, presenting an appealing vector through which outsiders can attack their networks undetected. More...
Source : circleid.com | 19-Jul-2008 20:34
Shim6 Host-Based IPv6 Multihoming: Ready for Testing
During the last decade, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been designing IPv6 as a replacement for IPv4. Most of the initial benefits of IPv6 (security, QoS, autoconfiguration,...) have been ported to IPv4 and IPv6 deployment has been limited. However, thanks to the huge IPv6 addressing space, it is possible to design protocols and mechanisms that are more scalable and more powerful than with IPv4. A typical example is the multihoming problem. This problem occurs when a site is attached to several Internet Service providers... More...
Source : circleid.com | 19-Jul-2008 19:27
European Researchers Introduce Live BitTorrent Streaming, Aim to Replace Traditional Broadcasting
European researchers have launched a beta version of a peer-to-peer streaming video service that is intended to eventually replace traditional broadcasts. This is the latest development from the P2P-Next project which has announced its trial program for streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P system using a zero-server approach. More...
Source : circleid.com | 19-Jul-2008 00:49
Note to John McCain: Technology Matters
One would think that, in 2008, the significance of the Internet and information technology would be universally acknowledged. That makes the recent news from the Presidential campaign a bit shocking. After ignoring technology issues for the past year, John McCain is poised to announce his great insight: tech policy isn't worthy of attention from the President of the United States. This is what I draw from the announcement that former FCC Chairman Michael Powell is drafting a technology plan for McCain, to be released shortly... What concerns me most is what the McCain plan apparently leaves out... More...
Source : circleid.com | 18-Jul-2008 22:30
The Cost of Walled-Garden Designs
The Swedish morning daily Svenska Dagbladet on their editorial page yesterday writes about the EU threat to intervene at mobile roaming costs for voice, SMS and data. The editorial is pushing the point that it's wrong for the EU to try and price regulate the market, but instead the free market will prevail. They even seem to be indicating that the current pricing is fair and that an EU price regulation would hamper investments. In very general terms I would agree with the editorial... More...
Source : circleid.com | 18-Jul-2008 19:02
Switzerland Leapfrogged Hong Kong as the Most Spammed Country, Says Recent Study
According to the most recent MessageLabs Intelligence monthly report, Switzerland has become the most spanned nation. From the report: "In June, Switzerland leapfrogged Hong Kong as the most spammed country with levels reaching 84.8% of all email. Many countries received a slight decrease in spam levels, with a few increases elsewhere, for example, spam in UAE rose by 7.4%, the highest increase this month. Spam levels in the US reached 68.8% in June, 77.8% in Canada and 74.3% in the UK. Germany's spam rate reached 73.5% and 73.2% in the Netherlands. Spam levels in Australia were 66.9%, 76.6% in China and 70.7% in Japan." More...
Source : circleid.com | 18-Jul-2008 18:41
Obama Says Cybersecurity Would Be Top Priority in His Administration
Sen. Barack Obama, the U.S. presidential candidate outlined in a speech yesterday, what he envisioned for a cyber-security infrastructure that would protect the nation's computer networks and strengthen science and computer education programs. "I'll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a national cyber adviser who will report directly to me. We'll coordinate efforts across the federal government, implement a truly national cyber-security policy, and tighten standards to secure information -- from the networks that power the federal government, to the networks that you use in your personal lives." More...
Source : circleid.com | 18-Jul-2008 07:22
Open Registration of Top-Level Domain .Me Turns into Crisis
The .Me Top-Level Domain (TLD) Registry officially opened today for everyone on a first-come, first-served basis at 15:00UTC July 17, 2008. In follow up to the launch of this TLD, companies, organizations and members of the public where told that they can get a "Web presence that is truly personal, and have their new Web site working within minutes!" But apparently the process hasn't gone as smoothly as planed. More...
Source : circleid.com | 18-Jul-2008 00:45
Romanian Authorities Arrest Over 20 Cybercrime Suspects
Authorities have arrested more than 20 people in Romania who are suspected of running online fraud schemes, according to media reports. The Tuesday arrests were confirmed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has been working with Romanian officials on cybercrime in recent months. The FBI would say only that the agency is aware of the arrests and because "this is an ongoing matter, we will have no further comment at this time." The losses caused by the cybercrime ring is estimated to reach millions of euros. More...
Source : circleid.com | 17-Jul-2008 23:56
The Mobile Internet? Now in Book Form!
As you can probably guess, everyone at dotMobi loves the mobile web. And when we're not building new sites and services for the mobile web, we're often writing about it. Sometimes on this blog. Sometimes at mobiThinking.com or dev.mobi. And sometimes in a brand new book called Mobile Internet for Dummies. More...
Source : circleid.com | 17-Jul-2008 19:31
BT and Ofcom
About 16 months ago, I heard Ed Richards of Ofcom speak at a CITI conference at Columbia, and blogged about it here. I remember thinking that Richards didn't seem to think that highspeed access to the internet was all that important. The market had to demand it, and the market wasn't being demanding. Also, he wasn't interested in government intervention to support highspeed access... More...
Source : circleid.com | 17-Jul-2008 06:32
RegistryPro to Open Pre-Registration and Announces Firm Relaunch Date for .Pro TLD
RegistryPro, the exclusive operator of the .Pro top-level domain (TLD) on the Internet, announced today it will begin accepting pre-reservations for .Pro domain names from new registrants from July 21 through August 31, 2008. This Pre-Registration Period is the second phase of the registry's highly anticipated transition to new registration parameters. More...
Source : circleid.com | 17-Jul-2008 02:46
Good News from Three Spam Cases in the U.S.
They say (whoever "they" are) that good things come in threes, and that certainly seems true for law enforcement against spammers this week. In New York, Adam Vitale was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $183,000 in restitution for a week of spamming AOL back in 2005... In Illinois, an FTC settlement requires Spear Systems and company executives Bruce Parker and Lisa Kimsey to give up $29,000, stop making "false or unsubstantiated claims about health benefits" of their products, and bars them from violating CAN-SPAM ever again... And finally, in Seattle, the Robert Soloway case continues... More...
Source : circleid.com | 16-Jul-2008 21:38
Soloway Court Case Reveals the Sophisticated World of Online Fraud
Testimony received during the sentencing hearing for notorious spammer Robert Alan Soloway has offered an inside look at the big business of online fraud. Although anti-spam efforts implemented by ISPs have deterred many small-time spammers, sophisticated players remain active and they have developed tools to make their efforts easier. From the stand on Monday, investigators revealed some of the techniques that Soloway allegedly used to send out massive amounts of email. After the government seized Soloway's computer servers, investigators found files with as many as 10 million email addresses on each server along with Dark Mailer software on each server. More...
Source : circleid.com | 16-Jul-2008 19:29
New RSS Feeds deep inside DomainTools
We just released a new RSS Feed Management system to DomainTools that allows subscribers to monitor alerts and other services using RSS feeds instead of email updates. Email alerts have bugged me for a while because they clog my inbox, RSS gets announcements out of the inbox and in a more usable area. We are [...]
Source : blog.domaintools.com | 16-Jul-2008 01:45
Google Sued for Selling Ads on Parked Domains and Error Pages
Google on Friday was sued for fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment, claims arising from the company's alleged sale of low-quality ads, reports Thomas Claburn, of InformationWeek. The class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., by lawyers from San Francisco-based Schubert Jonckheer Kolbe & Kralowec. The plaintiff is attorney Hal K. Levitte, who advertised his legal services though a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign last year. Should the lawsuit move forward as a national class action and succeeds in claming that all Google's AdWords advertisers have spent a similar percentage of their ad budgets on low-quality ads, Google could be liable for a significant sum. More...
Source : circleid.com | 16-Jul-2008 01:12
ISC's IPv6 Infrastructure Gets a GigE Boost from NTT America
ISC's IPv6 infrastructure was significantly improved by a donation of a GigE link from NTT America, a global IP network services provider and operator of the largest Tier 1 IPv6 backbone. The IPv6 transit provided by NTT America to ISC is being used to support F-root name server operations, many country-code top level domains that are ISC DNS hosting guests and Hosted@ISC participants, which include kernel.org, Mozilla, FreeBSD, Internet Archive and other public benefit software projects. More...
Source : circleid.com | 16-Jul-2008 00:48
Thought Convergence
We just got an outdoor sign installed on our building in Los Angeles. For those of you that missed the announcement Thought Convergence is the new parent company of Name Intelligence/DomainTools.com. If you want to drive by and check it out the address of the building is 11355 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064.
Source : blog.domaintools.com | 15-Jul-2008 21:45
YouTube Allowed to Mask Important User Data in Viacom Case
Defendants and plaintiffs in two copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers during evidence discovery, a spokesman for Google said late Monday. In a related blog post, Google says, "we are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users' viewing histories and we will not be providing that information." On July 4, YouTube had received a court order to produce viewing history data of its users to Viacom. More...
Source : circleid.com | 15-Jul-2008 20:21
Cybercrime Organizational Structure Has Evolved, Reveals New Report
Finjan?s Malicious Code Research Center has released a report on the latest developments of today?s Crimeware business environment. "With the transition of cybercrime from amateur hacker attacks to highly professional cybercrime business models," says the report. "We see that the organizational structure of cybercriminals reflects this trend. Individual hackers operating independently or groups of hackers with common goals have been replaced by hierarchical cybercrime organizations were each cybercriminal has his own well-defined role and reward system. The current cybercrime organizations bear an uncanny resemblance to organized crime organizations such as the Mafia." More...
Source : circleid.com | 15-Jul-2008 18:21
Mobile Internet Penetration Has Reached Critical Mass Says Recent Study
According to a report released by market researcher, Nielsen, 40 million US mobile subscribers (15.6 percent) actively use the mobile Internet, making the US a leader in mobile Internet adoption. In 16 countries tracked, the US leads in penetration, followed by the UK (12.9 percent) and Italy (11.9 percent). More consumers are expected to catch on with increased positive mobile Internet user experiences, anchored by increasing device capability, speed and content optimization. More...
Source : circleid.com | 15-Jul-2008 01:18
Not a Guessing Game
On Tuesday July 8, CERT/CC published advisory #800113 referring to a DNS cache poisoning vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky that will be fully disclosed on August 7 at the Black Hat conference. While the long term fix for this attack and all attacks like it is Secure DNS, we know we can't get the root zone signed, or the .COM zone signed, or the registrar / registry system to carry zone keys, soon enough. So, as a temporary workaround, the affected vendors are recommending that Dan Bernstein's UDP port randomization technique be universally deployed. Reactions have been mixed, but overall, negative. As the coordinator of the combined vendor response, I've heard plenty of complaints, and I've watched as Dan Kaminsky has been called an idiot for how he managed the disclosure. Let me try to respond a little here, without verging into taking any of this personally... More...
Source : circleid.com | 15-Jul-2008 01:18
U.S. Department of Defense to Deply Cloud Computing Infrastructure
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has thrown its weight behind cloud computing, signing a deal with HP to build out an ambitious cloud infrastructure, which will include storage and server capacity. The Web-based cloud model will enable U.S. armed forces personnel to configure and access a server on the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) network within 24 hours, according to the Agency, which oversees the U.S. military's battlefield command and control systems. More...
Source : circleid.com | 15-Jul-2008 00:49
FCC and Comcast: Reasonably Vague
So, the FCC will recommend that Comcast be "punished" or receive "sanctions" for its peer-to-peer throttling practice. And the network neutrality debate goes on, as does its ambiguities and vagueness. Even if you hate Comcast and agree with the net neutrality argument and the FCC's decision, one thing Comcast is correct in saying is that "reasonable network management" specified by the FCC in network neutrality policy set in 2005 is vague. Actually, the term "network management" by itself is broad before you even try to interpret what is meant by "reasonable", and it is not exactly correct in its application here... More...
Source : circleid.com | 14-Jul-2008 21:45
Anti-Phishing and Hong Kong
Planning for a short trip to Hong Kong tomorrow reminded me of Jonathan Shea, something I wanted to blog about but was waiting for the hype around the new generic Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to cool down. Jonathan Shea is an old friend who is in-charge of ".hk". I had the pleasure to catch up with him in Paris ICANN meeting. Before Jonathan, let me talk about something related that happened in Paris. At the Cross Constituency Meeting, there was a presentation by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). In summary, they were proposing working with registries to take down domain names that are suspected to be involved in phishing. More...
Source : circleid.com | 14-Jul-2008 17:34
Is It Time to Create a Market for IPv4 Addresses?
It's fascinating to watch the Internet technical community grapple with policy economics as they face the problems creating by the growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses. The Internet Governance Project (IGP) is analyzing the innovative policies that ARIN, RIPE and APNIC are considering as a response to the depletion of IPv4 addresses. More...
Source : circleid.com | 14-Jul-2008 06:54
Angelina Jolie: 2 Babies, 50 Domains
Angelina Jolie has shown that she is not just an accomplished actress but also a savvy domainer. The 33 year old superstar celebrated the birth of her and Brad Pitt's twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon, by registering a total of 50 domain names (including 4 .mobis!), increasing her total number of domains owned to a [...]
Source : dailydomainer.com | 14-Jul-2008 05:12