Internet Storm Center on the Spamhaus DOS

The Internet Storm Center (ISC) has a blog post up discussing the DOS attack against Spamhaus. They do confirm they saw traffic approaching 300Gbps against Spamhaus. They also point out that most people probably never knew.

The attack was significant, but not globally so despite the media reports to the contrary. When news of the attack reached the Internet Storm Center, we did have a brief moment of panic and contemplated resorting to cannibalism. However, we quickly decided against this option (due to a combination of calmer heads prevailing and a lack of consensus on whether people could be turned into bacon).

ISC has a lot of technical details about how to secure your DNS servers, and I strongly encourage everyone to go look and make sure their DNS servers are secure. I checked ours a few days ago. I really didn’t think they would be open; Steve gets DNS and keeps up with security so it was unlikely we had open resolvers. I looked up our resolvers anyway because a second pair of eyes on things is never a bad thing.

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MAAWG presents the first J.D. Falk award

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One of the things that I can talk about is the J.D. Falk award. This award was established by MAAWG, Return Path and J.D.’s family to recognize people who work, usually behind the scenes and without fanfare, to enhance the Internet and protect end users. I sat on the award committee and we had a number of nominations for very worthy work. But the nomination that stood out was the one for Tom Grasso. Tom was the driving force behind the creation of the DNS Changer Working group. He was responsible for connecting experts from throughout the Internet industry, including ISPs, anti-virus vendors, and the broader security community to prevent the Internet for going dark for  hundreds of thousands of infected individuals.
I am very proud of the decision the committee made. The bar has been set high for future recipients. Tom did an amazing job convincing lots of players to work together. His involvement definitely made the internet better for everyone, not just those infected by Rove Digital’s malware. What he did is a model for private / public partnerships in the future.
I don’t think I could say it better than the MAAWG press release, so I’ll just end with that.

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Spamhaus answers about the recent DoS attack

Answers about recent DDoS attack on Spamhaus

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So you want to start a company? (part 4)

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