Global Cyber News Bits, October 26, 2009 from CommunityDNS
Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.
Net set for ‘language shake-up’
Since 2008 ICANN approved the allowance of names written in non-Latin/ASCII character sets. If approved by the body on October 30 the first applications for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) will be accepted by November 16. The first IDNs could therefore be up and running by mid 2010.
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Mobile Broadband Operators Heading for Capacity Crisis
A recent study states that Internet traffic via mobile Internet devices will rise 25 times by 2012, yet for the same time period revenue for operators is expected to increase by a factor of 2. This illustrates that the cost for providing mobile broadband capacity is still high.
Comment: This illustrates the strong arguments providers are making towards the US’ FCC regarding Net neutrality. Providers are saying Net neutrality is OK for traditional ISP networks, but argue strongly against Net neutrality rules being levied upon wireless networks.
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Developing countries must boost broadband: UN
Lack of broadband infrastructure means developing countries are missing out on information technology benefits. Missing, or limited broadband infrastructure means loss of the development of offshore companies that may be used to help with the respective country’s economy.
Also lost are advantages people may have with the use of mobile phones. With lower access to broadband people are working to take advantage of what applications can be accessed via cell phones as in Africa the number of mobile subscribers outpaces fixed line subscribers by a factor of 20.
In developed countries people are 200% times more likely to have broadband access than in lesser developed countries. Also, in lesser develop countries broadband can be very expensive. For example, in Africa’s Burkina Faso, Central African Republic and Swaziland, broadband runs $1,300 per month while the monthly charge in Egypt and Tunisia is only $13.
The report came from the UN conference on Trade and Development.
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Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices
Researchers have been studying the vulnerability of Internet accessible devices where default passwords have not been changed and are still in place.
Out of 130,000,000 IP addresses scanned, nearly 300,000 devices had administrative interfaces that could be remotely accessed via the Internet. Of those 300,000 devices 21,000 still used default passwords. Even if default passwords had been changed cyber criminals could still determine passwords through brute force of cracking passwords. With that said, through extrapolation it is believed that 6,000,000 devices on the Internet are vulnerable.
Cybercriminals could access such devices to conduct click fraud, DNS cache poisoning or launch attacks on other systems.
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500,000 job hunter details exposed in Guardian hack
Hackers launched an attack on The Guardian’s Jobs website and made off with information from 500,000 people who had posted their resumes on the organization’s jobs website. The hack was stopped midway through, but what was exposed on the various resumes or CVs were names, email addresses, cover letters and the resumes themselves.
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Gift Cards Convenient And Easy To Hack
As with credit and debit cards, gift cards are a form of currency and are thus subject to cybercrime, as noted in recent research.
Cybercriminals can “sniff” the information through a scanner directly in the checkout line and then cloned and used against the retailer’s hacked web-based gift card application.
Cybercriminals can also clone unused gift cards. This occurs by cybercriminals taking unactivated cards, cloning the cards and placing the cards back on the rack for display. Once the card is purchased and activated the cybercriminal has access to the account.
The SQL injection flaw is also another method cybercriminals may use to hack web-based gift card applications to obtain information.
Recommendation is to begin utilizing same encryption standards being studied for the credit and debit card providers and processors.
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Filed under: Africa, Anycast, Broadband, Cache-poisoning, Communications Infrastructure, Community DNS, CommunityDNS, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, DNS, DNS Resolution, Egypt, FCC, Hijacking, ICANN, IDN, Infrastructure, Internationalized Domain Names, Mobile Networks, Net Neutrality, Security, SQL Injection | Leave a Comment
Tags: Africa, Anycast, Broadband, Business Continuity, Business resilience, Communications Infrastructure, Community DNS, CommunityDNS, Cyber crime, Cybercriminals, Data Breach, DNS, DNS Resolution, Gift Cards, Global resolution, ICANN, IDNs, Internet, Mobile Broadband, Resolution Service, Security, SQL Injection, UN
