After the first changing of the cryptographic
key in last October, it is now, on January 11, that the old KSK key (Key
Signing Key) of the root zone will be deactivated.
The process initiated in October 2018 to improve the security of the root zone, with the deployment of the Key Signing Key-2017, finds its achievement with the revoking of the root of the old key KSK-2010.
As indicated by Paul Hoffman, ICANN’s Principal Technologist, “The ICANN organization does not expect problems with the revocation. However, this is the first time a KSK in the Domain Name System (DNS) root has been revoked, so the ICANN org and the DNS technical community will be watching carefully for at least 48 hours after the publication of the revoked KSK-2010.”
To note, during the rollover on October, the
negative impacts were extremely limited and it would seem that only two
Internet services providers were impacted by interruptions during the process.
Of course, ICANN encourages solutions providers to no longer ship KSK-2010 in their products. ICANN should later publish a white paper about the full rollover process, including the lessons learned from this operation. ICANN communities will then be able to open discussions regarding upcoming rollovers that could happen.
As a result of the violation of the anti-abuse policy, the .me registry decided to suspend the Incels.me website for an indefinite period. For reminder, the website possesses a forum that regroups members claiming to be single despite themselves, or “incels”, and who exchange on their daily lives through this mean.
Disturbing comments, the source of the suspension
It is not without surprise that the administrators of the incels.me website saw their forum become inaccessible. The investigations done by the registry have allowed to discover hate speeches, threats of rape and even murder in the comments exchanged between the participants. The decision to shut down the website was promptly made on October 15th, 2018, due to the content that violated the anti-abuse policy. According to the registry, this measure was taken to force the Incels.me administrators to take down the inappropriate contents and to prevent hate speech from appearing on the forum again.
Incels.me website associated to attacks?
Last April, Toronto was the scene of a bloody attack, where a man murdered 10 persons by a vehicle-ramming attack. Before attacking, the man posted a message on social networks, where he declared himself “incel”. This is only after the investigation that the police discovered that the murderer was inspired by some violent contents from the forum of Incels.me. The link is quickly made between the individual and the content inciting hatred, but also rape, exchanged on the forum.
Incels.me financed by a Chinese giant with suspicious activities
The inquiries launched on the website allow to trace back to its main financier. Thanks to these investigations, we know today that the incels.me website is financially supported by a big Chinese entity that in parallel owns more than 54 000 other domain names. The investigators were shocked by the potential of illicit nature of this company’s activities, ZhuHai NaiSiNike Information Technology Co. Indeed, on the thousands of domain names registered, the major part is involved in websites hosting of prescription drugs’ illegal sale.
Despite the suppression requests of the abusive comments present on the incels.me forum, the Chinese company didn’t proceed to the removing. The website will thus remain suspended until the removing of the litigious contents.
In the context of the fight against insecurity on the web, DNS Belgium, the .BE registry, decided to intensify its action by cooperating with the FPS Economy [The FPS Economy, SMEs, Middle Classes and Energy is a Federal Public Service of Belgium which is responsible for contributing to the development, competitiveness and sustainability of the goods and services market in Belgium] in order to shut down fraudulent websites within 24 hours.
Philip Du Bois, general manager of DNS Belgium indicates: “This protocol will enable us to take even more targeted action, together with the FPS Economy, against possible abuses where .be domain names are involved. It underscores our ambition for a high quality and safe .be zone which serves as suitable environment for the further development of the Internet.”
The aim: to ensure
consumers a completely safe Internet browsing on .BE websites.
This procedure will ensure a much higher
reactivity. Indeed, until now, FPS Economy couldn’t request a blocking from the
registry regarding the content, moreover fraudulent websites with correct
identification data (at least of which the forgery couldn’t be proven), were untouchable.
The blocking required a request from the Prosecution, i.e. a two weeks long
procedure, which left plenty of time for the fraudulent website to create
important damages to the consumers. Several hundreds of such websites per year
were concerned!
From December, the 1st 2018, the protocol will then allow at the request of FPS Economy, the DNS Belgium registry to block .BE domain names which:
Are used for fraudulent websites
Host phishing websites
Of course, this procedure will be applied in
the case of serious crimes.
The blocked domain name’s owner will have two
weeks to react against the blocking. Without action of their part within 6
months, the blocked name will expire.
This still too rare initiative is to be
welcomed in a context of the fierce fight against cybercriminality!
The European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on 25th May and its impact on the management of your SSL certificates portfolio is not neutral.
All Certification Authorities have previously always relied on the WHOIS of the domain name that needs to be certified in order to validate that the certificate applicant has the domain name technical operator’s agreement.
In order to validate an order, one of the authentication steps involved sending an email to one of the email addresses (admin or technical) found on the WHOIS.
However, the GDPR has left its mark and registrars no longer have the right to provide domain name owner personal data without the owner’s explicit consent. This means that the WHOIS database is unusable in terms of Certification Authorities being able to send out validation emails.
Faced with this situation, the Certification Authorities propose sending domain validation emails to one of the following generic addresses by default:
What if none of these addresses exist or is it too complicated to create?
There is an alternative solution. The Certification Authorities are able to validate that you have the domain name technical operator’s agreement through TXT record verification in the DNS zone of the domain name to be certified.
By verifying the presence of this TXT record, the Certification Authority is able to:
issue the certificate if it is a simple DV certificate (Domain validation)
continue to the next authentication steps if it is an OV (Organization Validation) or EV (Extended Validation) certificate.
Even with this in mind, the GDPR is changing the game and is having a significant impact on the SSL industry.
If the generic email validation method is not possible and we have to use TXT record verification method then we will indeed see an increase in certificate processing times.
What are the benefits of using Nameshield to manage your SSL certificates portfolio?
As a Registrar, Nameshield offers a unique market advantage for its SSL clients.
Nameshield carries out a pre-authentication process before each order reaches the Certificate Authority. This makes it possible to anticipate any blocking factors and if necessary to act quickly to resolve them:
Modification of a WHOIS
Edition of the zone to set up a TXT record (if the DNS are those of Nameshield)
Creation of alias admin @, administrator @, webmaster @, postmaster @, hostmaster @ (if the MX are those of Nameshield)
Phishing is cybercriminals’ means of choice to hijack users‘ data, posing as a trusty company and then encouraging them to deliver personal information. We are often more inclined to think that this technique is reserved to hackers who try to steal banking or very sensitive information, and yet!
Source : mohamed_hassan via Pixabay
An American student of Ygnacio Valley High School, in California, had a great time reproducing identically the website on which his teachers connect to enter marks and comments. This same student then emailed his teachers to connect to the fake school’s interface, which looked exactly the same as the original one. Thus, he could retrieve their login ID and passwords, and used them in order to raise his grades but also to lower his classmates’ grades.
Arrested by the police, the student said that what he had done was “as easy as stealing a candy from a baby”. Expelled from school, he was identified thanks to his computer IP address.
Quite light in consequence, this data corruption attempt highlights the simplicity of access to this hacking means. Today, phishing is one of the most popular methods and the easiest to implement. Web users, while unaware and fooled by similarities, consequently provide personal, sometimes very sensitive data.
The good news just arrived, Webstresser.org, one of the websites most responsible of million DDoS attacks has been dismantled. This shutdown has been possible thanks to Europol’s active intervention.
For reminder, a DDoS is a cyberattack. The operating mode is to saturate queries servers so the websites hosted on these same servers cannot operate for web users anymore.
Many countries hand in hand to dismantle the network
According to the National Crime Agency’s research, Webstresser.org has been used by hackers for the launching of almost 4 million attacks around the world. Among its victims, there are many British banks.
To carry out this large scale operation, five countries, Croatia, Scotland, Canada, Netherlands and Serbia have combined their best policemen to lend a hand to Europol.
Although this is an operation of international concern, the German, Dutch and American authorities were in charge of closing the website definitely. Now, its operators can’t access it anymore and a message left by the American Ministry of Defense serves as the home page.
Heavy penalties for the hackers
The shutdown of webstresser.org also led to a wave of arrests in many countries like Scotland, Croatia and Serbia. According to the French law, a cyberattack is a criminal offence and the penalties are severe. Thus, if the attack aims individuals, the hacker or hackers can be sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment and a fine of 150 000 euros. If the attack touches the State or its institutions, the penalty can go up to 7 years of imprisonment and a fine of 300 000 euros.
Following this great haul, the Europol spokeswoman and operations coordinator, Claire Georges announced that measures will be taken against all users of the website around the world and that arrests will be expected.
We have learned from the press that Swaziland will change its name at the will of its Monarch.
Indeed, this little South African territory has not changed its name after the decolonization, fifty years ago. It will soon be the case, with the term eSwatini, the country of Swazi. If this information is more of a geopolitical notion, it will have an impact on the country’s abbreviation within the ISO standard 3166-1 alpha 2, and its extension will then change; a similar situation to the one of Kazakhstan, already discussed on this blog.
A new example which highlights the importance of the country’s stability in the choice of an extension used for an active communication.
In a recent article in this blog, we mentioned the arrival of Chrome 68 in July 2018 and the fact that HTTP will be considered “not secure” from then on. Well, this is not the only weapon that Google is planning to use to encourage large-scale adoption of encrypted websites. You may not be aware, but Google has submitted a number of applications to ICANN as part of the new TLD program, and as a registry, they have secured the management of 45 top-level domains*. Just as the .bank and .insurance extensions have very strict security rules, Google has announced that they will apply HSTS implementation and pre-loading to their new TLDs therefore making HTTPS implementation mandatory.
What is HSTS?
HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a way in which browsers automatically enforce HTTPS-secured connections instead of unsafe HTTP. For example, if the website http://www.nameshield.net is on the list, a browser will never make insecure connections to the website, it will always be redirected to a URL that uses HTTPS and the site will be added to its list of sites that must always be accessed through HTTPS. From thereon, the browser will always use HTTPS for this site, whatever happens, whether the user has accessed the site via a Favorite, a link or simply by typing HTTP in the address bar, he has nothing more to do.
HSTS was first adopted by Chrome 4 in 2009, and has since been integrated in to all major browsers. The only flaw in the process is that browsers can still reach an unsafe HTTP URL the first time they connect to a site, opening a small window for attackers to intercept and carry out such attacks as Man-in-The-Middle attacks, misappropriation of cookies or the Poodle SSLv3 attack which was very much in the news in 2014.
A fully secured Top-Level Domain
HSTS pre-loading solves all this by pre-loading a list of HSTS domains into the browser itself, eliminating the threat of attacks. Even better, this pre-loading can be applied to entire TLDs, not just domains and subdomains, which means that it becomes automatic for anyone who registers a domain name ending in that TLD.
Adding an entire TLD to the HSTS pre-upload list is also more efficient because it secures all domains under this TLD without having to include all of the domains individually. Since HSTS pre-load lists can take months to update in browsers, TLD setup has the added benefit of making HSTS instant for newer websites that use them.
HTTPS deployment will be obligatory for .app and .dev extensions
Google is therefore planning to make HSTS mandatory for its 45 TLDs in the coming months. What does that mean? Millions of new sites registered under each TLD will now be HTTPS (and domain owners will need to configure their websites to switch to HTTPS or they will not work). In order to use a .dev, .app, .ads, .here, .meme, .ing, .rsvp, .fly … domain name, you will need to acquire an SSL certificate and deploy HTTPS.
Our team is at your disposal for any questions related to TLDs, domain names or SSL certificates.
Recently, many frauds campaigns offering free Nike shoes here and IKEA vouchers of 500€ there have been going on. Last case in date, a fraudulent e-mails campaign announcing the winning of airline tickets with a nice value of 500€, graciously offered to the winners of a supposed contest proposed by Air France airline company. This scam has circulated around France and was shared on social networks, by e-mails and even relayed on WhatsApp.
A misleading typography: typosquatting
If we look at the e-mail in question, the link www.airfrạnce.com, inserted in the message, seemed to correspond to the official website address of Air France. Except for one little detail… The “a” of France is not a “a” of Latin alphabet but the “ạ” of Vietnamese alphabet. A single dot close then! Amazing case of typosquatting, a practice misleading web users by replacing, adding or deleting a letter in a domain name with the famous brand. Without enough vigilance, web users while thinking they are on a trusted website, could click on the link and find themselves redirected towards a page totally independent of the official website of the brand. On this page, a form to fill with their precious personal data in order to have a chance to win free tickets in this case. A confirmed scam.
The aim of these phishing and frauds campaigns is to collect as many personal information as possible. In other words, the identity thieves, the source of this kind of online attacks seek to obtain the e-mail, phone number and all interesting data of the tricked Internet user.
It was after the alert by Zataz website was sent, that Air France confirmed that it was indeed a fraud. It also encouraged web users to not consider this kind of message. It is also important to specify that the official website of the airline company is secured and authenticated by an SSL certificate, the browsers displaying the https://www.airfrance.fr
What to do in front of these attacks and how to prevent them
The first reaction to adopt is wariness on the user’s side. The more the offer and the benefit are attractive, the more cautious you should be. Don’t communicate your personal data via a form or by return of mail without checking beforehand the request’s authenticity.
Always check the final URL of the page on which you are redirected, be attentive to the typography. Generally, only the information on site are official. An SSL certificate presence and the proprietary data displaying are also good indicators.
On the brands owners’ side, a naming and defensive registration strategy allows to best protect its users. The efficient monitoring implementation will also allow to detect phishing attempts as soon as possible and to take action early in order to stop them.
The slamming is a fraud aiming to deceive companies in order to sell by emails unsolicited services for domain names.
These slamming attempts are easily recognizable and play on their contacts lack of knowledge in some cases. The slammers propose services that you didn’t solicit with your official registrar (registration, whois’update, owner or registrar transfer…) at high prices. These emails are sources of anxiety and lead you to take a quick decision.
For example, a standard slamming email would encourage you to register domain names in emergency because a third party would have done a domain names’ registration request using exactly your company name or your lead product, identically (as if by chance). They recommend you to register them without delay to prevent any cybersquatting. Obviously, the “fake registrar”, in its great magnanimity has put on standby the domain name registration order for the good of the company…
Warning, the slammer uses visual references and the right technical vocabulary, misleading that way the company. They can also make reference or put the logo of some registries or actors of the Internet environment in order to give credibility to their speech.
What to do if you have any doubts?
Forward your emails to Nameshield, which will confirm you if these mails are fraudulent.
We recommend a management of your domain names centralized and managed by a person informed of the operations associated to domain names. Don’t take any decision in a hurry. You can also make a whois to verify the sender’s identity and the existence of the “registrar” company. You will then notice that most of the domain names used for slamming campaigns have been recently registered and that the companies holding the names are unrelated to the registration office activity.
Be careful, your domain names are intangible assets to protect, secure and value.
Nameshield assists you on a daily basis, in the management of your domain names portfolio, your digital brands protection and the risks management on the web.
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