Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now one potentially “wormable” vulnerability — meaning an attack can spread from one machine to another with no human interaction — has appeared in Microsoft’s implementation of the domain name…
Tag: domain names
China’s Great Firewall Descends On Hong Kong Internet Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: At midnight on Tuesday, the Great Firewall of China, the vast apparatus that limits the country’s internet, appeared to descend on Hong Kong. Unveiling expanded police powers as part of a contentious new national security law, the Hong Kong government enabled police to censor online speech and force internet service providers to…
Protesting Mark Zuckerberg Comments About Fact-Checking, Fake News About Mark Zuckerberg Goes Viral
“I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday. Since then, Vice reports, “Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network…” Zuckerberg’s quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party…
Some ‘Reopen’ Domains Could Be Phishing and Malware Campaigns
CNET reports on new research from a threat-intelligence company into the more than 540 domain names registered this month with the word “reopen” in their URL. While hundreds of them are “designed to lend credibility to anti-lockdown protests,” and 98 more were purchased to thwart that effort, there’s still many other domains that “come from suspicious sources or resellers looking to…
ICANN Cheers Registrars’ Efforts to Fight COVID-19 Scammers
ICANN chief executive Goran Marby has a message for its hundreds of registrars. Though ICANN can’t involve itself in content issues, “That does not mean we are unconcerned or unaware of how certain domain names are being misused in fraudulent activities during this global pandemic.”
It is this concern that prompted me to contact the registries and registrars thanking them for their…
Microsoft Orchestrates Coordinated Takedown of Necurs Botnet
Microsoft announced today a coordinated takedown of Necurs, one of the largest spam and malware botnets known to date, believed to have infected more than nine million computers worldwide. From a report: The takedown effort came after Microsoft and industry partners broke the Necurs DGA — the botnet’s domain generation algorithm, the component that generates random domain names. Necurs authors register…
Facebook Sues Namecheap For Letting Scammers Register Lookalike Domains
Facebook filed a lawsuit this week against Namecheap, claiming the domain name registrar has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered through its service and which impersonated the Facebook brand. ZDNet reports: Christen Dubois, Director and Associate General Counsel at Facebook, said today that Facebook engineers tracked down 45 suspicious Facebook lookalike…
Sale of .Org Domain Registry Delayed By California Attorney General
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) demanding more information about the private equity takeover of the .org domain registry. The attorney general is seeking answers to 35 questions concerning the sale as well as documents sent between ICANN, private equity firm Ethos Capital, and Public Interest Registry (PIR), which…
Delivery Apps Keep Adding Restaurants Without Their Consent
Several delivery services, including Postmates, Seamless, Grubhub, and DoorDash, are offering food from restaurants without their explicit permission. “The delivery apps pull up restaurant menus listed online, from which customers make their selections, and couriers working for the apps place orders on their behalf,” reports Eater. “The process essentially inserts third-party apps as middlemen into a service many restaurants say they…
‘Why I Voted To Sell .ORG’
Richard Barnes, Member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees, writes: I joined the board’s unanimous decision to, sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for the .org top-level domain, to Ethos Capital. Since this transaction has gotten some attention, I’d like to speak a little about why, in my estimation, this deal is a good one for the Internet….