Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet

The efforts of a research firm took down a botnet responsible for 33% of the world’s spam.

The attack was multipronged. First the security firm reported abuses to ISPs regarding certain IP addresses. Secondly, the firm worked with registrars to deactivate registered names. Third, the firm registered backup domains that were not used, and fourth, the botnet was able to generate random domains based on a specific algorithm. The firm understood the algorithm and registered names possibly generated by this algorithm.

The effect was a botnet that had no where to turn. Now the individual bots have been orphaned and the security firm is working with the ISPs to notify the computer owners whose computers were once members of the botnet.

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MassMutual Warns of Data Breach

Employee and customer data for MassMutual could have been compromised. Data handled by a third party provider was breached.

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Majority of Web Apps Have Severe Vulnerabilities

A recent report indicates that close to 9 out of 10 web applications could lead to information exposure due to flaws as 87% of the Web applications analyzed had serious vulnerabilities.

60% of Internet-based attacks targeted Web applications. 90% of web vulnerabilities rested with commercial Web applications while 8% rested with browser-run applications.

25% of the attacks were SQL Injection-based with 17% of the attacks being attributed to Cross Site Scripting

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No Rush to Adopt Domain Names Written in Chinese in China

While ICANN has opened the gates for IDNs to begin in certain countries, China being one of them, it appears there is no great rush to acquire the Chinese equivalent of the currently used Latin character set.

In many cases Chinese organizations have reduced the number of characters to make it easier for Chinese to type in the URL. For example “Tenchnt” is known as “qq.com” for its users. Another company has used “163.com” as the URL for its brand name as companies often associate numbers with their brands.

In one case where someone has already grabbed the Chinese equivalent to one company’s name, the head of the company would like to purchase the name, but feels having it owned by another party would not create any harm to their existing brand.

While the Chinese character sets will aid Internet usage for the older population, the majority of China’s Internet population is already used to the current method of using the Internet.

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