Two competing bills to reauthorize America's FISA Section 702 spying powers advanced in the House of Representatives committees this week, setting up Congress for a battle over warrantless surveillance before the law lapses in the New Year.β¦
Human trafficking for the purposes of populating cyber scam call centers is expanding beyond southeast Asia, where the crime was previously isolated.β¦
10 years later... π€― Seriously, how did this thing turn into this?! It was the humblest of beginning with absolutely no expectations of anything, and now it's, well, massive! I'm a bit lost for words if I'm honest, I hope the chat with Charlotte adds some candour to this week's update, she's seen this thing grow since before its first birthday, through the hardest times and the best times and now lives and breathes HIBP day in day out with me. I hope you enjoy this video, and we'd both love to hear those swag ideas from you too π
A trio of Polish security researchers claim to have found that trains built by Newag SA contain software that sabotages them if the hardware is serviced by competitors.β¦
Russia-backed attackers have named new targets for their ongoing phishing campaigns, with defense-industrial firms and energy facilities now in their sights, according to agencies of the Five Eyes alliance.β¦
A series of attacks against Microsoft Active Directory domains could allow miscreants to spoof DNS records, compromise Active Directory and steal all the secrets it stores, according to Akamai security researchers.β¦
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has signed a working arrangement with its EU counterparts to increase cross-border information sharing and more to tackle criminals.β¦
A Belgian man has been arrested and charged for his role in a years-long smuggling scheme to export military-grade electronics from the US to Russia and China.β¦
Australia is building a top-secret cloud to host intelligence data and share it with the US and UK, which have their own clouds built for the same purpose.β¦
A years-old Bluetooth authentication bypass vulnerability allows miscreants to connect to Apple, Android and Linux devices and inject keystrokes to run arbitrary commands, according to a software engineer at drone technology firm SkySafe.β¦
Sponsored Post Edge security is a growing headache. The attack surface is expanding as more operational functions migrate out of centralized locations and into distributed sites and devices.β¦
More than five years after domain name registrars started redacting personal data from all public domain registration records, the non-profit organization overseeing the domain industry has introduced a centralized online service designed to make it easier for researchers, law enforcement and others to request the information directly from registrars.
In May 2018, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) β the nonprofit entity that manages the global domain name system β instructed all registrars to redact the customerβs name, address, phone number and email from WHOIS, the system for querying databases that store the registered users of domain names and blocks of Internet address ranges.
ICANN made the policy change in response to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a law enacted by the European Parliament that requires companies to gain affirmative consent for any personal information they collect on people within the European Union. In the meantime, registrars were to continue collecting the data but not publish it, and ICANN promised it would develop a system that facilitates access to this information.
At the end of November 2023, ICANN launched the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS), which is designed as a one-stop shop to submit registration data requests to participating registrars. This video from ICANN walks through how the system works.
Accredited registrars donβt have to participate, but ICANN is asking all registrars to join and says participants can opt out or stop using it at any time. ICANN contends that the use of a standardized request form makes it easier for the correct information and supporting documents to be provided to evaluate a request.
ICANN says the RDRS doesnβt guarantee access to requested registration data, and that all communication and data disclosure between the registrars and requestors takes place outside of the system. The service canβt be used to request WHOIS data tied to country-code top level domains (CCTLDs), such as those ending in .de (Germany) or .nz (New Zealand), for example.
The RDRS portal.
As Catalin Cimpanu writes for Risky Business News, currently investigators can file legal requests or abuse reports with each individual registrar, but the idea behind the RDRS is to create a place where requests from βverifiedβ parties can be honored faster and with a higher degree of trust.
The registrar community generally views public WHOIS data as a nuisance issue for their domain customers and an unwelcome cost-center. Privacy advocates maintain that cybercriminals donβt provide their real information in registration records anyway, and that requiring WHOIS data to be public simply causes domain registrants to be pestered by spammers, scammers and stalkers.
Meanwhile, security experts argue that even in cases where online abusers provide intentionally misleading or false information in WHOIS records, that information is still extremely useful in mapping the extent of their malware, phishing and scamming operations. Whatβs more, the overwhelming majority of phishing is performed with the help of compromised domains, and the primary method for cleaning up those compromises is using WHOIS data to contact the victim and/or their hosting provider.
Anyone looking for copious examples of both need only to search this Web site for the term βWHOIS,β which yields dozens of stories and investigations that simply would not have been possible without the data available in the global WHOIS records.
KrebsOnSecurity remains doubtful that participating registrars will be any more likely to share WHOIS data with researchers just because the request comes through ICANN. But I look forward to being wrong on this one, and will certainly mention it in my reporting if the RDRS proves useful.
Regardless of whether the RDRS succeeds or fails, there is another European law that takes effect in 2024 which is likely to place additional pressure on registrars to respond to legitimate WHOIS data requests. The new Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), which EU member states have until October 2024 to implement, requires registrars to keep much more accurate WHOIS records, and to respond within as little as 24 hours to WHOIS data requests tied everything from phishing, malware and spam to copyright and brand enforcement.
A security vulnerability previously added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerability catalog (KEV), which was recognized by CVE Numbering Authorities (CNA), and included in reputable threat reports is now being formally rejected by infosec organizations.β¦