Bill Woodcock – Network Securitas

February 18, 2019

A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks

This post was originally published on this siteThe U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy. This post seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series […]

December 11, 2019

The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

This post was originally published on this siteA top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to online marketers. The allegations stemmed from a three-year investigation by a U.S.-based researcher whose findings shed light on a murky area of Internet governance that is all too often exploited by spammers and scammers alike. There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version […]

March 11, 2022

Report: Recent 10x Increase in Cyberattacks on Ukraine

This post was originally published on this siteAs their cities suffered more intense bombardment by Russian military forces this week, Ukrainian Internet users came under renewed cyberattacks, with one Internet company providing service there saying they blocked ten times the normal number of phishing and malware attacks targeting Ukrainians. John Todd is general manager of Quad9, a free “anycast” DNS platform. DNS stands for Domain Name System, which is like a globally distributed phone book for the Internet that maps human-friendly website names (example.com) to numeric Internet addresses (8.8.4.4.) that are easier for computers to manage. Your computer or mobile […]

May 6, 2024

Why Your VPN May Not Be As Secure As It Claims

This post was originally published on this siteVirtual private networking (VPN) companies market their services as a way to prevent anyone from snooping on your Internet usage. But new research suggests this is a dangerous assumption when connecting to a VPN via an untrusted network, because attackers on the same network could force a target’s traffic off of the protection provided by their VPN without triggering any alerts to the user. Image: Shutterstock. When a device initially tries to connect to a network, it broadcasts a message to the entire local network stating that it is requesting an Internet address. […]