The American telecommunication company, Sorenson Communication, has forgotten to renew a domain name for only a few days in June 2016. The decision has fallen at the end of September 2017, Sorenson Communication has to pay a fine of 3 million dollars. Why such a high amount? The domain name which has fallen back into public domain was carrying a critical service for some users! It was the “Video Relay System” which telecommunication companies must provide to deaf people and persons with vocal d... Read More
The continuation of the Equifax case or how the controls implemented in the context of an ISMS (ISO 27001) can help to prevent security incidents?
October 3rd, 2017, Equifax’s ex CEO, Rick Smith, had to explain to the American Congress how the private data of almost one out of two Americans could be hacked. Let us briefly recall the chronology of events (for more information, we invite you to read Adriana Lecerf’s complete article): March 9th, 2017: An Apache Struts flaw is detected. Less than a week after, the security patch is validated and planned, but the latter is not applied on all the servers. March 15th, 2017: a scan is carried o... Read More
The CAA becomes mandatory in the small SSL’s world
Or how to benefit from it to implement a certification strategy specific to your company? In January 2013, a new type of DNS Resource Record has appeared to improve the control chain in the SSL certificates issuing. This record, called CAA for Certificate Authority Authorization, allows to specify for a given domain name which Certification Authorities are authorized to issue certificates. It’s an extremely interesting creation, in particular for big companies and groups, which technical teams ... Read More
Equifax victim of a massive cyberattack
The American company Equifax, based in Atlanta, present in 24 countries, has been the prey of a particularly worrying cyberattack. Equifax collects and analyzes personal data of customers soliciting a credit. At the beginning of September, the company revealed an intrusion in its database. This IT hacking could have potentially concerned around 143 million American customers and many others customers soliciting a credit like Canada or Great Britain. The criminals have exploited a breakdown in a... Read More
The 3 most common DNS attacks and how to defeat them
In October 2016, many popular websites like Amazon, Twitter, Netflix and Spotify have become unavailable to millions web users in the United Sates, during almost 10 hours, i.e. an eternity. The cause, one of the most powerful attacks of Internet history on Dyn’s DNS services, a major actor in this sector. Other companies like Google, The New York Times and many banks have also been the victims of different kinds of attacks aiming at the DNS, the last few years, and if in many companies, the DNS... Read More
DNS – the big forgotten of Internet
“DNS continues to be one of the most targeted Internet services, and it remains the Achilles heel of global Internet infrastructure. DNS was not only the most heavily abused protocol for reflection/amplification DDoS attacks this year, but an attack targeting a specific DNS provider was also the cause of the most widespread Internet outage of 2016 (Note: attack on the provider Dyn, which caused for about ten hours, the inaccessibility of a big part of Internet in the USA, particularly impacting ... Read More
Referendum in Catalonia
Context: Spain, divided in 17 autonomous communities can’t be compared to the administrative division of the regions. Indeed, these Spanish communities don’t have the same autonomy and Catalonia, located in the North East, benefits from an autonomous status, in effect since 2006. Issue of October 1st Last Sunday, the Catalan independent regional government organized a referendum concerning Catalonia independence among 7.5 million residents. This initiative has been quite badly perceived by the... Read More
Acquisition of Rightside by Donuts: What are the consequences on DPML Programs?
At the Internet new extensions launch, Donuts operator, the biggest extensions applicant (.services, .legal, .photos, .vin etc.) has launched a specific protection program in addition to the TMCH. The Donuts Protected Mark List (DPML) allows to block the registration by a third party of a domain name similar to the brand under all the extensions managed by the registry. For example, if the brand “iPhone” is registered in the TMCH (prerequisite) then in the DPML, no one can register <iphone.p... Read More
Irma storm and its unexpected consequences on the domain names industry
.TV means television, .FM, FM radio, .IO tech companies… Actually no. In fact, yes but no. These codes do not designate sectors of activity but territories according to ISO 3166-1 alpha 2: TV is for Tuvalu, a Polynesian state; FM is for Federated States of Micronesia ; IO for British Indian Ocean Territory. Why such a mix of genres? In fact, domain names and geopolitics make a whole. When you communicate with a .COM domain name, you trust Verisign, an American company. With a .FR, it’s ... Read More
.BRAND : 4 episodes, for this summer
Act 4: Reconstruction While a myriad of new extensions were open for recording, the time was to select .COM, .CM, .OM, .CO or .CAM records? .FR or .FRL? The decision to make registrations in all new extensions of course has a high cost and is no longer necessarily wise. This is also why, some brands have chosen a .BRAND: its own TLD, its own sovereignty, its own management rules! Many brands have opted for this configuration and we can see now the blooming of .BNPPARIBAS, .ALSTOM, .SNCF, .LECLE... Read More
