Security News
A Minister in the Singapore government has suggested the creation of an internet kill switch that would prevent minors from reading questionable material online - perhaps using ratings of content created in real time by crowdsourced contributors. "The post-COVID world will bring new challenges globally, including to us in the security arena," said Minister for Defence Dr Ng Eng Hen at a Tuesday ceremony to award the city-state's 2021 Defense Technology Prize.
The Internet Archive has launched a campaign against tech regulation by setting up a Wayforward Machine, semi-parodying its famous Wayback Machine archiving site. The Wayforward Machine paints a picture of the internet in 2046 - smeared with censorship, regulation, governmental interference, and more.
A database containing personal information on 106 million international travelers to Thailand was exposed to the public internet this year, a Brit biz claimed this week. According to data from The World Bank, Thailand racked up almost 40 million international arrivals in 2019, a number that was on the rise every year pre-pandemic except for 2014, the year the country experienced a military coup.
After spending five years poring over port scan results, infosec firm Imperva reckons there's about 12,000 vulnerability-containing databases accessible through the internet. The news might prompt responsible database owners to double-check their updates and patching status, given the increasing attractiveness of databases and their contents to criminals and hostile foreign states alike.
Russian internet giant Yandex has been targeted in a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that started last week and reportedly continues this week. A report in Russian media says that the assault is the largest in the short history of the Russian internet, the RuNet, and that it was confirmed by a U.S.-based company.
Automated traffic takes up 64% of internet traffic - and whilst just 25% of automated traffic was made up by good bots, such as search engine crawlers and social network bots, 39% of all traffic was from bad bots, a Barracuda report reveals. These bad bots include both basic web scrapers and attack scripts, as well as advanced persistent bots.
Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack. Vocus - the country's third-largest internet operator which is behind brands including Orcon, Slingshot and Stuff Fibre - confirmed the cyberattack originated at one of its customers.
Threat actors are capitalizing on the growing popularity of proxyware platforms like Honeygain and Nanowire to monetize their own malware campaigns, once again illustrating how attackers are quick to repurpose and weaponize legitimate platforms to their advantage. "Malware is currently leveraging these platforms to monetize the internet bandwidth of victims, similar to how malicious cryptocurrency mining attempts to monetize the CPU cycles of infected systems," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a Tuesday analysis.
CISA's Bad Practices catalog includes practices the federal agency has deemed "Exceptionally risky" and not to be used by organizations in the government and the private sector as it exposes them to an unnecessary risk of having their systems compromised by threat actors. These dangerous practices are "Especially egregious" on Internet-exposed systems that threat actors could target and compromise remotely.
Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. It's useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity.