Networking

TIME dotCom Bhd (“TIME” or “The Group”) will supply Internet speeds of 500Mbps to the Hack in The Box Security Conference 2012 (HITBSecConf2012) from 8 to 11 October, allowing conference participants to seamlessly showcase the latest in online security, data and encryption techniques. The connection would be a dedicated link direct to the global internet exchanges powered by TIME’s 100% Fibre Optic Network giving participants the fastest ever Internet access in Malaysia. It’s first of its kind for any HITB event.

More than 4.5 million DSL modems have been compromised as part of a sustained hacking campaign in Brazil, with the devices spreading malware and malicious web address redirects.

The attacks focused on a vulnerability in modem firmware that was largely ignored by users and the security community, security vendor Kaspersky said, allowing attackers to enter modem configuration settings and change the DNS server used to browse the internet.

 The Internet's next big land grab, which prompted Amazon.com to apply for the .music top-level domain and Google to bid for .cloud, is likely to come with a few limits.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is accepting comments through Sunday on whether it should ban applicants from using forthcoming top-level names -- thousands have been requested -- as single-word "dotless" domains.

Europe has tapped out its supply of Internet addresses in its assigned range, but some tech prospectors believe they've found some IPv4 gold—a full block of 16,777,216 addresses that isn't used to connect to the Internet. But the British government agency that owns the block of addresses (referred to in IP networking as a /8 block) has no intentions of giving it up, even though almost none of the addresses will ever be publicly accessible. That has inspired an electronic petition campaign on a House of Commons website to convince British lawmakers to auction off the address block.

Websites of broadcaster Al Jazeera were offline last night as the media outlet continued to suffered from an attack against Domain Name System (DNS) servers.

Al Jazeera's main website was also defaced at one point, according to a screenshot captured by Zone-H.org, which tracks website vandalism. A group calling itself Al-Rashedon claimed responsibility, displaying a Syrian flag and large red stamp reading "Hack."

Jeremy Hunt has pledged to give creative industries a shot in the arm by ensuring Britain has the fastest broadband network of any major European country by 2015.

The culture secretary's commitment marks a firming up of the government's original target to create the best superfast broadband network in Europe by the end of this parliament, and follows a House of Lords report into the national broadband strategy published last month.

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in a top DDoS attack tool that provides a handy means to neutralise onslaughts.

The Dirt Jumper Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Toolkit is one of the most popular attack tools available. It was deployed in a digital siege against security news website KrebsonSecurity.com among many, many other victims in recent months. The weapon works by instructing an army of compromised computers to flood a website with traffic until legitimate visitors are unable to connect.

Swiss researcher Pedro Pinto and his colleagues at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne suggest using the Sparse Interference algorithmPDF to make tracking down the origins of internet threats more efficient. Until now, institutions such as the US National Security Agency (NSA) have used brute force methods to search for the sources of epidemic threats (malware, worms, trojans, internet rumours) in complex networks – but scanning all potentially affected network nodes or address spaces requires a lot of time and resources.

 Hackers who spent their teen years phone-phreaking -- breaking into telephone networks and making free calls -- have created their own GSM network at Defcon and are using creative and silly apps on highly customized Android phones.

Monday, 9 July, was supposed to be 'Internet Doomsday' when the US' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was to shut down servers associated with the DNSChanger malware. As a result, computers infected with this threat were to be cut off from the Internet.