Tag Archive for: Internet’s

In conversation with Gene Hoffman, co-creator of the internet’s first ad blocker • The Register

/in


Interview Gene Hoffman is one of the founders of PrivNet, which in 1996 developed Internet Fast Forward, the internet’s first commercial ad blocking software. He helped found the company as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the help of fellow students Mark Elrod, Jeff Harrell, and James Howard.

PrivNet released Internet Fast Forward in mid-1996 and by November of that year, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) announced that it was buying the startup.

Hoffman has been involved in the creation and sale of two other companies, EMusic.com, sold to Vivendi Universal in June 2001, and Vindica, sold to Amdocs in 2016. He’s currently president and COO of Chia Network, a cryptocurrency platform founded by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.

In an interview with The Register, Hoffman revisited the early days of ad blocking and discussed how the technology industry has changed over the past 25 years. What follows is a transcript of the discussion, edited for clarity.

***

Hoffman: I had a friend from high school who originally went to MIT and ended up back in North Carolina. UNC was kind of oddly central to the development of the internet. A lot of people kind of don’t know the deep roots there, but Usenet was created to stop people from getting drunk and crashing their VWs as they went back and forth from Duke to UNC, because all the Dukies would go to Chapel Hill to party and bad things would happen on the way back.

Linux was hosted locally at SunSITE at UNC back in the day. When I got to college as a freshman, the World Wide Web was just finally a thing. Gopher was still something you actually used a lot. The first moment in the fall, when there were thunderstorms rolling through and I downloaded real-time radar data and watched it on, you know, some painful old Macintosh, it was like, “Oh my this is going to be big!”

We’d seen Netscape IPO, you know, we’d seen that things were going the way we all…

Source…

An Outage Hit Major Websites. The Internet’s Infrastructure Appears Shaky.

/in



Leon Neal/Getty Images

Text size

Source…

Ransomware: The internet’s biggest security crisis is getting worse. We need a way out

/in


Organisations continue to fall victim to ransomware, and yet progress on tackling these attacks, which now constitute one of the biggest security problems on the internet, remains slow.

From small companies to councils, government agencies and big business, the number and range of organisations hit by ransomware is rising. One recent example; schools with 36,000 students have been hit, leaving pupils without access to email as attempts were made to get systems back online. That’s at least four chains of schools attacked in the last month.

Ransomware gangs are getting craftier, and nastier, in their relentless pursuit of profit. It’s not enough to break into computer systems and encrypt the data to render it useless. Now the crooks are stealing some of the data and threatening to reveal it. And it’s not just data such as customer records: the cyber criminals will look for anything that might be sensitive or embarrassing on the network, and use the threat of publishing it as leverage against victims. And in many cases it seems to work.

SEE: Security Awareness and Training policy (TechRepublic Premium)

So what can be done to stop these attacks? Organisations of all sizes need to understand the ransomware threat, and figure out how to improve their own security – even getting the basics right can go a long way towards deterring attacks. The software industry also needs to do a better job of building secure software. Is this going to happen? That’s unlikely, as there’s just too much pressure to ship software fast and generate profit. The multiple ways companies can customise and integrate software also means that even if it ships as perfectly secure, security holes will emerge as soon as it’s used in the real world. Worse, ransomware groups are adept at seizing on newly discovered flaws and utilising them as part of their attacks, with the ransom money providing funds to sustain longer and more complicated attacks. In the longer term, the…

Source…

The Internet’s Most Notorious Botnet Has an Alarming New Trick

/in


In just the last two months, the cybercriminal-controlled botnet known as TrickBot has become, by some measures, public enemy number one for the cybersecurity community. It’s survived takedown attempts by Microsoft, a supergroup of security firms, and even US Cyber Command. Now it appears the hackers behind TrickBot are trying a new technique to infect the deepest recesses of infected machines, reaching beyond their operating systems and into their firmware.

Security firms AdvIntel and Eclypsium today revealed that they’ve spotted a new component of the trojan that TrickBot hackers use to infect machines. The previously undiscovered module checks victim computers for vulnerabilities that would allow the hackers to plant a backdoor in deep-seated code known as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is responsible for loading a device’s operating system when it boots up. Because the UEFI sits on a chip on the computer’s motherboard outside of its hard drive, planting malicious code there would allow TrickBot to evade most antivirus detection, software updates, or even a total wipe and reinstallation of the computer’s operating system. It could alternatively be used to “brick” target computers, corrupting their firmware to the degree that the motherboard would need to be replaced.

The TrickBot operators’ use of that technique, which the researchers are calling “TrickBoot,” makes the hacker group just one of a handful—and the first that’s not state-sponsored—to have experimented in the wild with UEFI-targeted malware, says Vitali Kremez, a cybersecurity researcher for AdvIntel and the company’s CEO. But TrickBoot also represents an insidious new tool in the hands of a brazen group of criminals—one that’s already used its foothold inside organizations to plant ransomware and partnered with theft-focused North Korean hackers. “The group is looking for novel ways to get very advanced persistence on systems, to survive any software updates and get inside the core of the firmware,” says Kremez. If they can successfully penetrate a victim machine’s firmware, Kremez adds, “the possibilities are endless, from destruction to basically complete system takeover.”

While TrickBoot…

Source…