Posts Tagged Verisign

Twitter attack prompts a DNSSEC reminder

eWeek Europe’s look at the December attack that took down Twitter suggests that businesses need a stronger focus on DNS security, and includes this reminder about DNSSEC from Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense:

“Basic DNS monitoring is sorely lacking,” he continued. “While enterprises may monitor DNS availability, and are increasingly aware of DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks targeting domain name servers, simple monitoring for DNS integrity is often overlooked. Enterprises should also pay attention to the rollout of DNSSEC, which mitigates some attacks, but is not yet widely available.”

The attack  used “legitimate credentials to log in and redirect Twitter.com to a site purporting to be under the control of the Iranian Cyber Army,” the article notes.

No Comments

Deployment watch: Penn, dot-TM, VeriSign, Dyn and NamesBeyond

Help this newsletter stay up-to-date on your organization’s deployment news by submitting information about your DNSSEC deployment deadlines, test beds or other progress to <[email protected]>. This month’s updates include:

* University of Pennsylvania first U.S. university to deploy:  The University of Pennsylvania announced it is the first U.S. university to implement DNSSEC across the entire institution. Shumon Huque, a Penn IT technical director, also is working with EDUCAUSE to secure the dot-EDU top-level domain “Higher education can take a leadership role in securing the DNS,” Huque said.  “If a few universities in advanced networking adopt DNSSEC and share experiences, we can make broad deployment more straightforward for the larger community.”

* Turkmenistan announces DNSSEC deployment:  Turkmenistan’s dot-TM domain registry has launched DNSSEC. While not a trademark registry, it encourages trademark owners to register dot-TM names.

* VeriSign launches boot camp, tools and training to aid DNSSEC deployment:  VeriSign has created a technical “boot camp” program to train registrars, ISPs and larger registrants in DNSSEC assessment and implementation.  The effort also includes an interoperability lab that will allow vendors to evaluate how their equipment works with DNSSEC.  Network and computing equipment manufacturers also are being invited to VeriSign to review how DNSSEC will work with their equipment when DNSSEC is implemented in the .com and .net TLDs. VeriSign has announced it will deploy DNSSEC in the dot-COM and dot-NET domains by early 2011 and is working with EDUCAUSE on DNSSEC deployment in the dot-EDU domain.

* Dyn, Inc. reports on testing with dot-ORG:  Dyn, Inc. published resources and updates about its testbed and other preparations for deploying DNSSEC for  dot-ORG zones registered with the company.

* NamesBeyond has embedded support for DNSSEC. They offer DNSSEC management and configuration, allowing customers to configure DNSSEC parameters such as key type, size, validity period, supporting both NSEC and NSEC3 parameters.

, , , , , , ,

No Comments