One of the basic tools in network design is the so-called "stacked" protocol model. This model was developed in the late 1970s as part of a broader effort to develop general standards and methods of networking. In 1983, the efforts of the CCITT and ISO were merged to form The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection, usually referred to as the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model or the "OSI model." more
It has been a long time coming. In the world of global 5G security, there is only one principal forum. The somewhat cryptically named 3GPP SA3 is dedicated to 5G security and holding its 103rd meeting electronically next week from 17 to 28 May with 772 submitted documents and 189 participants registered. SA3 meets every 60 days and exists at the security center of an ecosystem of numerous technical groups encompassing many hundreds of companies, industry organizations, and government agencies worldwide. more
I recently saw an article in FierceWireless that reports that Huawei thinks we are going to need an intermediate step between 5G and 6G, something like 5.5G. To me, this raises the more immediate question about why we are not talking about the steps between 4G and 5G? The wireless industry used to tell the truth about cellular technology. You don't need to take my word for it... more
Recently, I have been reporting on a highly questionable auction scheme for a single domain name, o.com, which is currently being improperly warehoused by ICANN along with a number of other .com and .net domain names. This violates ICANN's Bylaws -- but, so what? more
It's now been a decade since the world officially ran out of blocks of IP addresses. In early 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that it had allocated the last block of IPv4 addresses and warned ISPs to start using the new IPv6 addresses. But here we are a decade later and not one of my clients has converted to IPv6. more
The report, "A Decade of Passive DNS" provides a longitudinal analysis of the use and popularity of top-level domains over a ten-year period. The findings are based on what Farsight Security has seen in passive DNS from 2010-2019 based on a ten-year data rollup, excluding DNSSEC-related records. This study allows us to report on four measures for that period for each of the 1,576 IANA-recognized TLDs. more
There have been rumors for years about merging Dish Networks and Direct TV to try to gain as much market synergy as possible for the two sinking businesses. It's hard to label these companies as failures just yet because between two companies collectively still had 21.8 million customers at the end of 2020 (DirectTV 13.0 million, Dish 8.8 million). This makes the two companies collectively the largest cable TV providers, with Comcast at 19.8 million and Charter at 16.2 million. more
"2021 will be another challenging year for us, but it's also the year that our future development strategy will begin to take shape," said Eric Xu, Huawei's Rotating Chairman. Huawei generated CNY152.2 billion in revenue, a 16.5% decrease year-on-year. The Network Business continued to grow. It wasn't officially announced1, but consumer products other than phones probably increased sales. The fitness tracker, earbuds, and watches are winning strong reviews. more
The new Biden Administration in the USA laid out a $100 billion proposal for broadband investment as part of its $2 trillion+ infrastructure plan. Under the proposal, the plan is to provide national broadband coverage. The Administration will use better competition measures, such as price transparency, the use of public utility infrastructure, and subsidies for low-income households to achieve its goals. more
Yesterday, The Epoch Times reported on leaked internal Chinese government documents revealing that premier Xi Jinping has "personally directed the communist regime to focus its efforts to control the global Internet, displacing the influential role of the United States." Xi's ultimate aim is for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to wield "discourse power" over communications and discussions on the global geopolitical stage by controlling content on the Internet. more
One of the major takeaways from the Web Globalization Report Card is the importance of providing "front doors" to your localized websites. These doors begin with the addresses themselves, which may not include the .com domain. In fact, I'd recommend that most localized websites not use the .com domain, as this is an overloaded domain. This article looks at the many ways brands are creating more localized addresses, beginning with country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). more
There was a recent dispute between OneWeb and SpaceX regarding the possibility of a collision between two of their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. OneWeb's satellite (OneWeb-1078) was launched on March 25 and headed for its orbit at an altitude of 1,200 km when, in early April, it passed near a SpaceX satellite (Starlink-1546) in orbit at about 450 km. There was no collision, but subsequently, OneWeb's government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin said... more
Efforts have been ongoing in the ICANN community to develop a better understanding of its role in the combat of abuse. This theme has been rising in prominence every year since 2018, and 2021 appears to be the tipping point, in which consensus has built around the idea that more can be accomplished in terms of reducing the impact of rogue actors using the Internet for malicious purposes. more
Last year, Facebook created its widely dubbed "Supreme Court" (officially the Oversight Board) in an effort to outsource some of the platform's most difficult content decisions. By all accounts, Facebook hoped the Board would have global legitimacy to make the toughest content decisions and help avoid reputational damage for being biased, arbitrary, tone-deaf, or worse. more
There was a headline in a recent FierceTelecom article that I thought I'd never see - Jeffries analyst says the rural broadband market is ripe for investment. In the article, analyst George Notter is quoted talking about how hot rural broadband is as an investment. He cites the large companies that have been making noise about investing in rural broadband. Of course, that investment relies on getting significant rural grants. more
Colonial Pipeline, which accounts for close to half of the United States East Coast's fuel, has shut down its operations due to a cyberattack. The incident, believed to be the largest successful cyberattack on oil infrastructure in the U.S., was disclosed over the weekend. more
A multi-year investigation into 2017 net neutrality rulemaking finds 18 million fake comments were filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and half a million fake letters were sent to Congress. more
SpaceX on Tuesday disclosed that it has received 500,000 preorders for its Starlink satellite internet service and that it anticipates no technical problems meeting the demand. more
New Zealand's .nz operator, InternetNZ, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability against authoritative DNS servers. The vulnerability called TsuNAME was first detected in February 2020 in the .nz registry and found that it could be exploited to carry out Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across the world. more
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Government of India, approved permissions today to Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) for conducting trials for use and applications of 5G technology. more
Beavers Chewing Through Fiber Cable Cause Hundreds Lose Internet in a Canadian Remote Community
Internet service was down for nearly 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, over the weekend after beavers chewed through a crucial fiber cable, resulting in "extensive" damage. According to a statement from the area's telecom provider, Telus, the outage also affected some cable TV customers and caused disruptions to local cell phone services. more
The US Department of Defense gave a small unknown Florida company control to millions of its dormant IP addresses, minutes before President Trump left office. According to reports, the unknown Florida company, Global Resource Systems LLC, initially obtained control of 56 million Pentagon-owned IP addresses on January 20 and later increased to near 175 million IP addresses. more
Security Researcher Dan Kaminsky Has Died
The celebrated security researcher, Dan Kaminsky, widely known for his work on discovering cruicisl DNS security flaws, Sony Rootkit infections and pupular talk at the Black Hat Briefings. more
ISPs in the U.S. saw a significant surge in both downstream and upstream traffic, increasing at least 30% and as much as 40% during peak business hours and as much as 60% in some markets, according to a new report from the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG). more
Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .org top-level domain, today launched the DNS Abuse Institute, a centralized effort to combat DNS Abuse. In its news release, PIR said the Institute "will bring together leaders in the anti-abuse space to fund research, publish recommended practices, share data, and provide tools to identify and report DNS Abuse." more
Despite several groundbreaking technical achievements over the past nine years, Google's parent company Alphabet has decided to end the Loon project. The company said the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization (ICANN org) announced that all of the current 1,195 generic top-level domains (gTLDs) have deployed Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). more
Donuts stated today that it has completed the acquisition of Afilias announced on November 19. Donuts' CEO Akram Atallah says the company is now ready to begin the integration plan promising minimal disruptions to customers. more
The Government of Niue, a small island 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, launched proceedings today demanding a "redelegation" of its country code top-level domain, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more
Cloudflare and Apple, along with Fastly, on Tuesday announced a new proposed DNS standard that separates IP addresses from queries preventing an entity from seeing both at the same time. more
According to an announcement on Monday, the Internet Society has agreed to extend its existing financial commitment to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for an additional term of six years. more
The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center on Monday announced it had registered its 50,000th "cybersquatting" case. The 50,000th case just received by WIPO coincides with the organization's 20th anniversary on November 20, 2020. more
Cloudflare's new report warns about the significant increase of DDoS attacks and their level of sophistication. The numbers doubled from Q1 to Q2 and doubled again in Q3, resulting in a four-fold increase compared to the pre-COVID level in the first quarter. more
Donuts and Afilias announced today that Donuts is acquiring Afilias in a deal that is expected to close in December 2020 for an undisclosed amount. The combined entities will support over 25 million domain names spanning well over 400 TLDs. The deal will not include certain Afilias businesses, such as the mobile software and registrar businesses, which will remain with Afilias' original group of investors. more
The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of ordinary people worldwide, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, reports Motherboard. Among the apps connected to this type of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app with more than 98 million downloads worldwide. more
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Threats can come from anywhere, even from legitimate hosting infrastructure. In fact, many cybercriminals often host their command-and-control (C&C) servers in known hosting providers' networks, sometimes those that offer bulletproof hosting services, to evade detection and consequent blocking. more
Magecart-style attacks have been around for a while and continue to be mentioned in the news in 2021. We found and collected a list of 20 domain names that have been mentioned in the past months on VirusTotal as Magecart indicators of compromise (IoCs). more
Addressing Domain Name System (DNS) abuse has been a priority of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), notably since March 2020. During its 70th conference, the organization's members talked about creating a web page defining DNS abuse-related terms, which should be updated over time, to help users report cases. more
Managing a company's digital assets, administrators must keep their eyes on who has access to important resources like domains, domain name servers, and digital certificates - and with which vendors. more
Next week we will celebrate World IP Day. Observed annually on the 26th of April, World IP Day was created by WIPO in 2000 to highlight the critical role that intellectual property plays in our daily lives and in society as a whole. more
The accidental leak of Volkswagen's new name that turned out to be an April Fool's prank made headlines. Some were relieved that it was just a marketing stunt, while others cried foul. But those in the field of cybersecurity became more curious. What did the cyber world look like during the supposed leakage until the announcement that it was a prank? more
Increased use of internet services, broader application of IoT devices, and COVID-related shift to remote work are just a few factors accelerating the transition to the new era of the Internet. However, the current network architecture is falling behind the imposed expectations to support new-age integrations, leaving one to wonder if the gap will close up any time soon. more
Typosquatting can enable a variety of cyber threats that include but are not limited to phishing, malware-enabled attacks, and vulnerability exploitation. In a nutshell, the attackers can rely on the technique to mimic legitimate solution and service providers' domains to trick users into thinking they are getting update notifications from their vendors, for example, when they are actually not. more
For 25 years, the Complaints Office of eco -- Association of the Internet Industry has been successfully combatting illegal content on the Internet. The 2020 report now available shows that the independent hotline is making a significant contribution to the take-down and criminal investigation of illegal content. more
Did you know that a comprehensive subdomain database can give you 69,383 fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) with the string "firewall," 241,654 FQDNs for "cctv," and 19,048 FQDNs for "scada"? That data can give cybersecurity researchers possible starting points for an article or even a full-blown research paper. more
Throughout the history of the Internet, traditional DNS traffic - for example, when a user types a website name into a browser - has largely been unencrypted. The DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol, which first emerged in 2018, makes use of the well-known secure HTTPS web protocol to change that. more
In 2020, reports say 94% of malware were delivered via email. Phishing remains a threat, as it accounts for more than 80% of security incidents that can cost victims almost US$18,000 per minute. more
The Q1 2021 New gTLD Quarterly Report from our MarkMonitor team examines .kpmg usage, new gTLD Alexa.com rankings, recent launch analyses, and potential policy effects on .brand 'next round' applicants. more
Privacy is of great concern to a majority of Internet users -- and legitimately so. After all, not all of the companies that handle personal data reveal where they use the information. Privacy is one of the primary reasons for the use of VPNs, proxies, and even Tor. more
In the past years, threat actors have made it a point to prey on U.S. taxpayers using phishing emails supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The goal is often to trick victims into giving their login credentials to various platforms. This year is no different. more
In August 2020, we wrote an article on preparing for the reduction of certificate life cycles from two years to one. Discussions continue, and given the push for shorter certificate terms by the CA/B Forum - in particular the browsers - we predict the move to lower certificate life cycles will continue, and that terms will be reduced to 90 days within the next 24 months. more
On 13 March, IBM X-Force Exchange published nine artifacts -- three domain names and six IP addresses -- related to a squatting campaign targeting JPMorgan Chase and its stakeholders. We dug deeper into the list in hopes of publicizing additional artifacts that users may need to be wary of. more
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