We’re always sharing the most interesting DNS, security, and enterprise IT content we can find on our Google+, Facebook, and Twitter pages. We realize it’s hard to catch everything (with all of the social noise coming at you), so at the end of each month we gather the best articles we’ve found and bring them together in one convenient roundup. These are the best of June. Enjoy!
DNS
- 1,400 New Domain Names Are Coming. What Does It Mean For You? – As we prepare for the release of 1,400 new domain extensions such as .book, .music to .sport, the Public Internet Registry (PIR) is also focusing on specific domains for the charity and non-profit sector that will see a whole new type of classification online with the domain extensions .ngo and .ong (which has its roots in Latin languages).
- DNS Reflection Defense – Recently, DDoS attacks have spiked up well past 100 Gbps several times. A common move used by adversaries is the DNS reflection attack, a category of Distributed, Reflected Denial of Service (DRDos) attack. To understand how to defend against it, it helps to understand how it works.
- New TLDs: The Future of Domain Names (Infographic) – Have you ever tried buying a domain name? If yes, then you know the pain that comes along with it. Everytime you think of a name and assume that it can’t be taken, you end up being wrong. Almost anything imaginable has been taken by someone and some of them are just hoarding it.
- The LinkedIn Hack that Wasn’t – The bad redirection caused an outage, but doesn’t seem to have caused any more damage, since the target of the faulty redirect was apparently just a service provider’s holding page.
- Domain Name Buyers Will Need To Verify Phone Or Email After New ICANN Agreement – There’s no rocket science in registering a domain name online. One just needs to visit a domain registrar’s website, select an available domain name and make the payment. Things are about to change though, after a new ICANN agreement, which makes it mandatory for domain registrars to verify phone or address of their customers within 15 days of them buying a domain.
- Is it Time to Drop ‘www’ from Government Site Promotions? – Banks do it, utilities do it, even media does it, is it time for government to also do it – drop the ‘www’ from web site promotions in advertising and links?
- How Will the Introduction of New gTLDs Change the Internet? – ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the body responsible for managing and coordinating the Internet’s Domain Name System, last week made a surprise announcement that the first new gTLD could go live in the internet as early as August 28 2013 and we may see the first registrations from September 28.
Security
- How to Make Your Blog or Forum Non-sensitive to Spam Attacks – There is a great variety of products to protect your web project against an inescapable evil of the modern Internet – spam attacks, which refer to the spreading of illicit hyperlinks via comments and forum posts on legitimate sites.
- Biology Shows Us How To Prevent Hackers From Stealing Data – From denial of service attacks to server crashes to day-long disruptions of Google Drive, almost all organizations are familiar with threats to their information security. Given that digital information is more central than ever, it’s worrisome that the history of data security is littered with failure.
- 7 Essentials for Curbing DDoS Attacks – Go ahead and ask CSOs from the nation’s largest banks about the myriad distributed denial-of-service attacks they’ve experienced in recent months. They’re not going to tell you anything. Security execs have never been comfortable talking about these attacks because they don’t want to draw more attention to their companies.
- Tech Companies Eye Security that Goes Beyond Passwords – In late February, a thief or thieves cracked into Evernote’s digital vault filled with log-ins, passwords and email addresses belonging to 50 million users. It was a shocking cyberattack considering the Redwood City, Calif., company offers online lockers for people to safely store their files.
- The Future of Social Media Hacking; How Far Will It Go? – You might think that social media hacking is when someone posts an embarrassing status update on your Facebook or Twitter, but as the popularity of social media grows exponentially, so too does the criminal activity associated with it. Although you don’t include any financial information on social media networks, the large amount of personal information you place on there means that identity theft is on the rise.
- Protect Your Website: How to Fight DDoS Attacks – Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a cyberattack that makes a specific resource unavailable to its intended user, are becoming more complex and sophisticated. Attackers don’t just carry out single attacks — they repeatedly test their target’s security and target their assault to achieve the highest amount of damage.
- The NSA Leaks: Security Lessons…and a Wake-Up Call – While much of the world debates whether Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contractor who divulged details about the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) data-collecting programs, is a traitor or a whistleblower, we security types are pondering other types of questions.
Enterprise IT
- Building a People-Centric Datacenter – If you’re ever looking for a way to frustrate your users, making it difficult to log on is a great way to start. Unfortunately, the pressure to adopt a wide variety of cloud-based services is forcing many companies in exactly that direction.
- The Week Oracle Suddenly Became BFFs with Everyone in Enterprise Software – Things in Oracle-land got curiouser and curiouser this week. On Monday, Oracle announced a deal with Microsoft, on Tuesday with Salesforce, on Wednesday with NetSuite. On Thursday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hugged it out.
- Enterprises Prefer Private Clouds: Survey – Adoption of cloud models is moving into a mature stage as more organizations expect to transition key IT operations to the cloud over the next five years, with private cloud deployments leading the way. Today, 61 percent of organizations have at least a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud.
- Marketing, Storage + Security: The Crossroads No One Saw Coming – I’m a marketer by trade. The reason that I’ve taken a liking to storage and data in general, is because I think that the CMO of tomorrow has to understand data two- to three iterations higher of a degree than CMOs of today. Pick your buzz word: Big Data, Data Revolution, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, etc.
- Is Anyone Really Responsible for Your Organization’s Data Security? – It happens time and again. A meeting is called to discuss one of the big issues that frame a company’s essence: reputation, brand, networks and alliances, intellectual capital, innovation. Most are intangibles, the factors that drive business but are not captured by GAAP accounting on a balance sheet or income statement.
We’ll leave you this month with a brief, but detailed, description on how Reverse DNS works.
Image Source: mae.noelle
