NetHappenings

Happy Reading for today.

 <Karen>


1)

Military industrial complex aims to revamp email
Trust but verify By John Leyden
A consortium of British and US military agencies and defense and aerospace firms have agreed a new standard for secure email. Security experts are watching the developments closely, but are unsure how much of the specification will make it into public use or commercial email security products.
The secure email specification from the The Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP) aims to address email's inherent identity and data transmission security flaws. The specification covers a method for authenticating users that creates a Public Key Infrastucture system that could act as the backbone for other forms of electronic collaboration.
The requirements were defined and endorsed by the members of the TSCP: the US Department of Defense (DoD), UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), BAE Systems, Boeing, EADS, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Rolls-Royce.
The US Defence Department intends to use the specification to protect "controlled but unclassified information". The MoD also expects to deploy the capability enterprise-wide in 2008 for classifications up to "UK Restricted".
The TSCP implementation is based on TSCP-defined publicly available specifications which organisations must follow to assign vetted identity information to all email senders and recipients. The current implementation was constructed with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, open source software, and a commercial trusted third-party service, CertiPath. The resulting digital certificate-based system ensures that information only travels to and from trusted parties. The framework plugs into either Lotus Notes or Outlook clients.
PKI has long been touted as the next big thing in information security. But the difficulty of putting in such systems and integrating them with other platfors has made the technology complicated and costly. Even though most aspects of the TSCP approach are public, it's unclear how much impact the approach will have in the wider world outside military organisations and their contractors.
"I don't know how much of this will end up public. Certainly I'm interested. And certainly email could use a major security overhaul," security guru Bruce Schneier told El Reg. "People are abandoning the medium in favour of others that are less spam-filled."


2)
CIA: Multiple Power Outages Overseas Laid to Hacker Extortion
“Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference.
All the break-ins occurred outside the United States…..”


3)
It's a Comcastrophy

Comcast Must Replace CEO, Investor Says
http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUSN1723901820080117
Comcast needs to replace Brian Roberts with a "qualified CEO," because
the U.S. cable giant's stock is a "Comcastrophe," says Chieftain
Capital, an investment advisory firm that owns some 60 million shares
of the company. Comcast is said to be providing "zero return" to
investors.


Comcast's been port 25 blocking since 2004

Friday, January 18, 2008 12:12 AM
Comcast's been port 25 blocking since 2004
Selectively at least (on a per account basis, based on high volumes)
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5230615.html  - Jun 10 2004

--quote--
Comcast, the nation's largest broadband Internet service, this week began
selectively blocking a network loophole commonly exploited by spammers.
The cable giant, whose broadband Internet service has more than 5.7 million
subscribers, said it will block what's known as "port 25" for accounts
suspected of sending mass amounts of unsolicited e-mail. The company will
implement blocks based on subscriber accounts with the most outbound
activity.
--end quote--
Around the same time, Declan quoted this unusually candid Comcast engineer -
http://www.news.com/2010-1034-5218178.html
--quote--
"We're the biggest spammer on the Internet," network engineer Sean Lutner
said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last
week.
Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a
mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers. Almost all of
the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie
computers--a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams
for each American family every day.
--end quote--
Both fairly typical figures for large broadband networks where there's no
such filtering. You'll find several hundred zombie generated spam / emailed
malware etc sent out for every single legitimate email sent by a human using
that network
And that was in 2004. The zombie / virus problem has if anything become far
worse, by orders of magnitude. So if someone isn't already filtering port 25
now is the time to start.
And of course, keeping in mind what my good friend UOregon's Joe St.Sauver
says about port 25 blocking .. blocking port 25 and hoping the zombies will
go away is like treating lung cancer with cough syrup.  There's assorted
other nastiness (DDoS, phishing / id theft, password cracking efforts,
repositories for child porn, etc) that a zombie PC gets used for.
So detecting and taking down zombie PCs is the second part of the strategy.
Which is why several large providers are deploying "walled gardens" as
well.. where if your computer is infected and emitting malicious traffic, it
gets isolated into its own little corner of the internet from where only
windows update / AV etc sites, and the ISP's support page are accessible.
Users can click a button the first few times to remove themselves from the
walled garden after cleaning their PC, after which they need to call the
ISP's 1-800 number.

MAAWG best practice on walled gardens -
www.maawg.org/about/whitepapers/MAAWG_Walled_Garden_BP_2007-09.pdf
And as a complement to this, there's the IAB workshop on unwanted traffic,
held a couple of years back .. the proceedings from which were summarized in
RFC 4948.
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg03989.html

Proceedings from the workshop (dated March 2006) -
http://www.iab.org/about/workshops/unwantedtraffic/index.html


December 5, 2005
Comcast plans 6% rate hike / Increase comes as phone firms prepare to enter cable market
> Comcast plans 6% rate hike
> Increase comes as phone firms prepare to enter cable market
I wouldn't mind it that much if Comcast could resolve its "minor" technical
problems... like normalizing the audio output across its channels.
I'm not talking about the difference between the compressed blasting that
accompanies most commercials; I'm talking about the 10dB difference between
its digital and audio channels. For several months, Spike TV was a good +5dB
above all the other channels on the spread on my end of their network. I
called customer support several times; they said they'd pass my complaint on
to Spike TV. Suggesting that maybe a technician dial back the level at the
head end was greeted with silence. "The head end of what?"
Sigh. It's a Comcastrophe.
See also:
( http://tinyurl.com/25ccyj )