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Showing posts from February, 2013

Cyber Security Concerns Go Viral This Week

NPR Security Week Mashable LA Times CBS Washington Post Atlantic Council Reason Magazine This week the CIA released its still-classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding the threat of cyber warfare to US economic, infrastructure and military assets at home and abroad. China is singled out as the source of an enormous and non-stop sequence of industrial espionage - compromising systems and stealing valuable trade secrets.    Heads of large corporate security interests, while representing a variety of unique approaches, all seem to at least agree that federal regulation should play a larger role in online life. User's real identities should remain authenticated, core infrastructure easily available for lawful intercept, etc. Others argue that corporate attack victims should begin systematically seeking retribution when systems are compromised, terming the approach "active defense" centered often around pro-actively collecting information crucial to

Sending Invoices for "DNS Services" Without Providing DNS Services - A Marketing Strategy?

I have received more than one report that a company that refers to itself as "DNS Services" has been sending out invalid invoices. In each instance, someone receives a physical letter referring to the recipient's website and 'Managed DNS Backup Services' that are being provided and that need to be paid for. To grant legitimacy, the letter directly refers to a pair of name servers - ns3.dnssvc.com and ns4.dnssvc.com. The trouble is, those servers are not name servers, and have not been name servers during the month-long period that I reviewed them (late December 2012 - now). The servers do not respond successfully to any requests on port 53. At the time of this writing, they still do not respond to port 53. Its one thing to make a mistake on an invoice, however I have received two complaints, both with the exact same letter specifying the same DNS information that is incorrect. Both complainants say they have never heard of this company before. DNS Service'