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Kim Zetter reporting on Wired: Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.

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More under: Cyberattack, Internet Protocol, Security

Aircell, the company that provides the new Gogo Internet service on some American Airlines flights, is reported to be signing another airline to its service. Aircell management expects there will be some 2,000 commercial airplanes offering Gogo by the end of next year.

Mary Hayes Weier reporting on InformationWeek: "American Airlines has installed Gogo on 15 airplanes for flights between New York and Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco, and Delta says it'll have Gogo available across its domestic fleet of 330 commercial jets within a year. Delta is expected to expand that service to Northwest Airlines flights if the merger of those two companies goes through as planned..." Virgin America is also reported to be placing Gogo on its flights.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Wireless

Following last year's report on the Unity trans-Pacific submarine cable project, research company, TeleGeography reports today that "Google is working with a consortium of carriers planning to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system. The new cable, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), would link Unity's landing station in Japan to Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore." Report further indicates that the work is still in the planning phase. 'Given the current flurry of undersea cables under construction, the SJC cable will probably not be ready for service until 2011 at the earliest,' said TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin.

With a few exceptions, SJC consortium and Unity are reported to have the same members which include Google, Bharti, SingTel, KDDI and Global Transit.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband

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An exclusive report from Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper says that an international criminal gang has managed to steal the identities of an estimated eight million guests of the Best Western hotel chain in a hacking raid that could ultimately net billions of dollars in illegal funds.

According to the report, late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defenses of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007.

Update 11/25/2008: Best Western Responds to Sunday Herald Story Claiming Security Breach

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More under: Cyberattack, Security

Britain's Government has warned that computer networks controlling electricity supplies, telecommunications and banking are under constant attack at a rate of thousands of times a day. According to reports, the cyberwar against Britain is waged by criminals and terrorists some of whom are backed by foreign stats.

"If you take the whole gamut of threats, from state-sponsored organizations to industrial espionage, private individuals and malcontents, you're talking about a remarkable number of attempted attacks on our system—I'd say in the thousands," Lord West of Spithead, the Security Minister said. "Some are spotted instantly. Others are much, much cleverer."

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More under: Cyberattack, Security

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a ban on some wireless microphones and other low-powered devices that operate in the 700-MHz band after the digital TV transition in February, next year. This is part of an attempt to clear any potential interference with the "white spaces” spectrum which will be fully available for "public safety as well as commercial wireless services".

"So almost 7 months after the start of the 700 MHz auction that produced income of $19 billion, FCC is finally getting around to kicking the wireless microphones out of the band they have sold to others for use starting in 2/09, less than 6 months from now," says Michael Marcus, radio technology and spectrum policy consultant who formerly worked at FCC. "But don't expect immediate action. The NPRM only proposes to stop legal use of channels 52-69 for wireless microphones. But since most use is already illegal the real impact is questionable. It proposes to stop approving new models and freezes all pending applications for equipment authorization, but previously approved models can be imported and sold by the thousands pending further action."

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More under: Policy & Regulation, Wireless

One of China's largest ISPs has recently fallen victim to the DNS vulnerability. The security company Websense has reported that the DNS cache on the default DNS server used by the China's Netcom customers has been poisoned. The incident was first discovered on Tuesday, Aug 19th, by Websense's Beijing lab.

Webssense researchers say they have seen other DNS vulnerability attacks however decided to publicize this particular case because of its uniqueness. According to reports, hackers have only exploited one of Netcom's DNS servers in China. When China's Netcom customers mistype and enter an invalid domain name, the poisoned DNS server directs the visitor's browser to a page that contains malicious code.

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More under: Access Providers, Cyberattack, DNS, Security

Broadband competition in the US is as good as it gets in the foreseeable future and will potentially decrease according to telecom and tech regulatory analyst, Blair Levin. "There's not that much left to be disruptive," Levin said. "White spaces could be in rural areas, and a little bit in broadband, but I don't think so. Other things that people are looking to be disruptive I don't think will happen."

According to a report by Telephony, "Levin, who is rumored to be a potential candidate for an FCC [Federal Communications Commission] appointment should Barack Obama win the presidency, also made some predictions about the telecom agenda of a Democratic administration. Ubiquitous, affordable broadband will be a priority for an Obama administration, Levin said, and Obama's FCC would likely be charged to move very quickly on that agenda."

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Wireless

American Airlines, using Aircell Gogo for the in-flight mobile broadband service launched yesterday on flights between New York and San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami, and Delta will also rollout Gogo across its domestic flights within about a year.

Airlines are starting to offer Internet access, but are falling into one of two camps: airplane antennas that beam down to cell towers, or beam up to satellites. Several airlines are lining up behind service provider Aircell, which has built its own cellular network, erecting towers across the United States, following the win of a coveted FCC frequency license in 2006.

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More under: Broadband, Mobile, Wireless

Two professors from the University of Washington and Yale University, presenting at a conference in Seattle today, describe a new and faster data transfer technology across the Internet. Professors Arvind Krishnamurthy and Richard Yang believe their technology offers a better solution to current challenges facing broadband providers.

Their algorithm, called P4P or "local file-sharing," finds the shortest path across the Internet by tracking users' locations—improving both, download speeds by about 20% as well as bandwidth requirements.

The following is an abstract from today's discussion:

As peer-to-peer (P2P) emerges as a major paradigm for scalable network application design, it also exposes significant new challenges in achieving efficient and fair utilization of Internet network resources. Being largely network-oblivious, many P2P applications may lead to inefficient network resource usage and/or low application performance. In this paper, we propose a simple architecture called P4P to allow for more effective cooperative traffic control between applications and network providers. We conducted extensive simulations and real-life experiments on the Internet to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of P4P. Our experiments demonstrated that P4P either improves or maintains the same level of application performance of native P2P applications, while, at the same time, it substantially reduces network provider cost compared with either native or latency-based localized P2P applications.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, P2P

Recent report says many textbooks and articles have created the myth that the Internet Protocols (IP) were designed for warfare environments, while in reality they originally focused on operational aspects of the protocol and overlooked security implications. United Kingdom's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) has released a document raising awareness of the many security threats from attacks based on the Internet protocol.

According to this report, "producing a secure TCP/IP implementation nowadays is a very difficult task" partly because no single document provides security roadmap for the protocols.

While seeking feedback from the community, the CPNI's document offers insights and advice for secure implementation of the Internet Protocol.

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More under: Internet Protocol, Security

High-speed Internet access is so important to the welfare of U.S. consumers that America can't afford not to offer it—free of charge—to anybody who wants it, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Kevin Martin has told USA TODAY.

Leslie Cauley reports: "Martin wants to use a block of wireless spectrum to help bridge the gap. By attaching a 'free broadband' condition to the sale of the spectrum, known as AWS-3 (for advanced wireless services-3), Martin thinks he can help drive broadband adoption in rural areas in particular. Only 25% of network capacity would have to be reserved for free broadband. The rest could be used to provide premium broadband services."

Karl Bode of DSLreports.com however, says Martin is no consumer advocate: "Still, between his rather toothless crackdown on Comcast and his new wireless broadband plan, he's doing a bang up job convincing the mainstream press otherwise as he prepares for a post-FCC political career."

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Policy & Regulation

In follow up to August 1st ruling against Comcast, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a 67 page order released today has given Comcast 30 days "to disclose the details of their unreasonable network management practices, submit a compliance plan describing how it intends to stop these unreasonable management practices by the end of the year, and disclose to both the Commission and the public the details of the network management practices that it intends to deploy following termination of its current practices."

The FCC has also said that if Comcast does not follow the timeline issued today, it will be subject to the following 3 steps:

1. Interim injunctive relief automatically will take effect requiring Comcast to suspend the network management practices within 35 days of the release of this order;
2. The Enforcement Bureau will immediately issue an order directing Comcast to show cause why a permanent cease-and-desist order should not be issued against it; and
3. A hearing will be set for thirty days after Comcast's receipt of that order.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Law, P2P, Policy & Regulation

Last month a government-backed deal was struck between Britain's six biggest Internet service providers and the entertainment industry in order to send warning letters to file-sharers. Today it has been reported that thousands of people suspected of sharing music, films and games over the Internet are going to be facing legal action in UK for damages.

One law firm, according to Reuters, is going to the High Court to force ISPs to release names and addresses of 7,000 suspected file-sharers and that they have already begun proceedings against several people in Britain. One British woman has been ordered to pay 16,000 pounds for downloading pinball game for free through a file-sharing site.

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More under: Law, P2P

While Apple can't single-handedly transfer the Internet to IPv6, it can provide killer apps that will drive adoption among consumers, says Prince McLean of AppleInsider. McLean continues: "That kind of thing is right up Apple's Infinite Loop alley. The company pushed for adoption of the MPEG AAC codec with iTunes and the iPod, upgrading the world from MP3 while preventing the world's music from being locked up in Sony's ATRAC or Microsoft's Windows Media DRM. Most other music players now support AAC as well… Apple's relatively small but high-impact market power has pushed a number of other open standards. So how can Apple push IPv6? One killer app for IPv6 is already being sold: Back to My Mac (BTMM ) works by tunneling IPv6 traffic between machines over the IPv4 Internet using IPSec."

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More under: IPv6

29 percent of Internet users have purchased goods from spam emails, according to new research by Internet security company Marshal. The most commonly purchased items include sexual enhancement pills, software, adult material and luxury items such as watches, jewellery and clothing.

Marshal's research, which asked 'What purchases have you made from spam,' attracted 622 responses with 29.1 percent indicating that they had made purchases. The poll showed the proportion of spam purchases had risen when compared to a similar Forrester Research poll from 2004, which surveyed 6,000 active Web users and reported 20 percent had made purchases from spam.

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More under: Spam

A US firm was among ISPs operating in Argentina that recently received orders from the country's Department of Justice to put a stop to all local traffic visiting a particular gambling website operating without a license. An anonymous source, according to Ian Lamont of The Industry Standard, has said that Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) was floated as a possible option to accomplish this task although later not implemented due to high costs.

Lamont reports: "The DPI approach would be troubling on a number of levels. First, any ISP using DPI is going beyond a government mandate to simply block traffic to a particular site. The ISPs would actually be peering inside their customers' Web traffic without their knowledge." Although DPI wasn't used in this particular case, "it will probably be considered in the future as a way to take offensive or illegal sites offline."

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality, Privacy

In reaction to U.S. republican presidential candidate John McCain's release of his technology policy statement on August 14, Lawrence Lessig has released a video presentation criticizing the tech plan for lack of change to important issues such as broadband penetration declines in the country. Early during the video presentation, Lessig has this to say:

"...the single most important fact about internet's development in last decade has been the extraordinary decline United States has faced with respect to our competitive partners. We started the Bush administration at no. 5, we will end at no. 22. And the question anybody should be asking about internet policy here, is why we did so poorly and what change there might be to reverse that decline. How will we change this decline and in particular in evaluating John McCain's technology platform, we should be asking whether in his platform there is something new or something different from what he has be espousing to this date. Something that might actually reverse the consequences of policies which he himself has been largely responsible for supporting. Now as I evaluate his policy in light of this question, I just don't see it. I don't see what in his policy will affect a reverse in this decline."

Listen to the rest of Lessig's response in the video below:

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality, Policy & Regulation

The attacks against websites in Georgia are most likely populist in nature rather than state sponsored says Gary Warner, director of computer forensics research at UAB. In a blog post today, Warner has provided some evidence regarding his speculations including scripts from Russian language websites. He writes: "This script was copied from one of more than forty Russian language sites where I found copies of an 'attack script' that people were being encouraged to run on their own computers..."

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More under: Cyberattack, Security