2011 was an interesting year for IPv4: in February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) handed out their last free IPv4 address blocks to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

In April 2011, the APNIC (the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region) started allocating from its last /8. At the RIPE NCC we did not see a big jump in IPv4 address allocations in 2011, as anticipated by some observers.

The image below shows the total amount of IPv4 address space allocated each year (calculated as /16s on the y axis). You can see that in 2011 there was a drop in the amount of IPv4 address space from the previous year, bringing it down to the level of 2008 and 2009. There was no big run on the remaining IPv4 addresses.

Note that this does not correspond with the number of requests. Especially the number of requests for /21s increased in 2011 (you can find more on this in the background article on RIPE Labs).

IPv4 is certainly running out, but there is no great rush for the last addresses as feared by some. It was all pretty much "business as usual". As we've said in the past, predicting exactly when the RIPE NCC will run out of IPv4 address space is difficult. We cannot anticipate the size of requests we'll receive.

For more information and more statistics, please refer to IPv4 Allocation Statistics in 2011 on RIPE Labs.

Written by Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC

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More under: IP Addressing, Regional Registries

The trade press is abuzz today with reports about a security breach at Verisign. While a security breach at the company that runs .COM, .NET, and does the mechanical parts of managing the DNS root is interesting, this shouldn't be news, at least, not now.

Since Verisign is a public company, they file a financial report called a 10-Q with the SEC every quarter. According to the SEC's web site, Verisign filed their 10-Q for June through September 2011 on October 28th. where it's been available to the public ever since.
Like every other 10-Q, it has a Risk Factors section which lists all the reasons that the company might fail, so don't sue us. Normally those sections are pretty routine, key employees might quit, customers might desert us, key contracts might not be renewed, that sort of stuff. But this 10-Q contained this bit:

We experienced security breaches in the corporate network in 2010 which were not sufficiently reported to Management.

In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers. We have investigated and do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System ("DNS") network. Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was exfiltrated. The Company's information security group was aware of the attacks shortly after the time of their occurrence and the group implemented remedial measures designed to mitigate the attacks and to detect and thwart similar additional attacks. However, given the nature of such attacks, we cannot assure that our remedial actions will be sufficient to thwart future attacks or prevent the future loss of information. In addition, although the Company is unaware of any situation in which possibly exfiltrated information has been used, we are unable to assure that such information was not or could not be used in the future. The occurrences of the attacks were not sufficiently reported to the Company's management at the time they occurred for the purpose of assessing any disclosure requirements. Management was informed of the incident in September 2011 and, following the review, the Company's management concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures are effective. However, the Company has implemented reporting line and escalation organization changes, procedures and processes to strengthen the Company's disclosure controls and procedures in this area.

Apparently nobody got around to reading it until today, at least nobody who understands the business well enough to know what it means.

All the press reports I've seen just regurgitate that paragraph, adding a few quotes from people close to Verisign who all said they didn't know about it either, and security types who told us that it's an enormous big deal. (Now that you've read the paragraph, you're as qualified to pontificate as anyone.)

Personally, I don't know if it's an enormous big deal or not. Risk factor sections tend to be written as pessimistically as possible, so you can skip over the parts about they cannot assure you and so forth. One thing I do know is that it happened over a year ago, so if anything significant happened as a result, and Verisign knew about it, they'd have told us about that, too, on the principle that you release all your bad news at once. So this means that either it really was just a minor network breach, or the evil consequences are so deep and subtle that we may not know about them for years and years, if ever. I'd tend toward the former, but then, I'm not a Verisign stockholder.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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More under: Cyberattack, DNS, Security

"Facebook reported in its SEC filing that it owns 'network equipment' valued at $1.016 billion at the close of 2011," reports Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. "The number reflects the expense of rapidly building a massive Internet infrastructure, including Facebook's shift from buying vendor gear and leasing data centers to building its own servers, racks and custom data centers."
Facebook Constructing New Data Center - Located 62 miles south of the Arctic Cicle, Lulea. Facility consists of three 300,000 square feet server buildings; scheduled for completion by 2014.

Photo above shows Facebook's first outside the U.S. data center currently being built on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The northern Swedish city of Lulea chosen for the data center is partly because of the cold climate — crucial for keeping the servers cool — and access to renewable energy from nearby hydropower facilities, according to the company.

Image below is a visualization of Facebook's social graph of 500 million back in 2010 created by intern Paul Butler.
Facebook 'Friendship Visualisation' shows pairs of friends between the world's cities based on company's 500 million user base in 2010. Facebook's current user base at the time of its SEC filing is reported to be over 800 million.(Click to Enlarge)

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"More than two months after authorities shut down a massive Internet traffic hijacking scheme (link), the malicious software that powered the criminal network is still running on computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies, and on PCs at nearly 50 percent of all federal government agencies, new research shows," reports Brian Krebs. ... "Internet Identity, a Tacoma, Wash. company that sells security services, found evidence of at least one DNSChanger infection in computers at half of all Fortune 500 firms, and 27 out of 55 major government entities."

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More under: Cybercrime, DNS, Malware, Security

Recently, we have seen many rumours and half-truths about ACTA being circulated by campaigners on all sides. And, as the European Commission's "fact sheet" 10 Myths about ACTA shows, there are also still a lot of misunderstandings. Many decision makers and citizens seem not yet to be aware of ACTA's serious implications.

In the following, we are focusing on the real problems and most important issues in ACTA:

read more

• Email Newsletter EDRi-gram 10.2 delayed
• ACTA - Frequently Asked Questions
• Data Protection Week 2012: CPDP and the BarCamp
• Police frequently uses Silent SMS to locate suspects
• The Lobby on ACTA is reaching a new level
• ACTA "uprising" in Poland
• FAVA'S bill: Another attempt to limit civil rights in Italy
• Geolocation censorship to be applied by Twitter
• Belgian Big Brother Awards 2012
• ENDitorial: EDRi's initial comments on the Data Protection Regulation
• Recommended Action
• Recommended Reading
• Agenda

ICANN has started its historic and controversial program to expand the number of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). This essay outlines the factors needed for the program to create economic value, warns against a cognitive trap that complicates selection of a new gTLD and considers the value contribution of the registries. I will not go into relevant macro measures, but I examine the problems associated with the popular measure of simply counting the number of registrations.

The key to understanding the program's economic impact is to follow the theories of economist Paul Romer and look at how the rearrangement of resources creates value. ICANN's program increases the supply of resources that registries have for creating value. Value creation by registries can come from: (1) introducing new TLD signals for things like location, community, and social responsibility (for example, .nyc for New York City, .music to signal community, and .green to signal environmental corporate responsibility); (2) combining information, such as in the .tel model, which provides contact information for the companies using the gTLD; and (3) introducing a gTLD that competes with .com.

Given the new resources provided by ICANN, the burden now lies on the registries to innovate. But they have to be careful of cognitive biases in choosing among the gTLDs. For example, a registry that chooses the proposed .music should ask itself, "Is there value in .music?" The temptation is to ask the far easier "Do we love music?" Not the same thing, but studies show that we often answer an easier question instead of a harder and more relevant one, and that we'll do so without noticing the swap. (For details on cognitive error traps, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I have warned against cognitive biases in gTLD value estimation and in domain name appraisals.) Another trap is reliance on the popularity of key words in social media, an approach that flopped with the recent failure to predict the success of presidential candidates.

Remember, there is no easy way to measure new gTLD value creation. The domain name industry has focused on registrations, but that's because they are easily measured and the information is publicly available. Number of registrations does provide a viable measure of a registry's profits, but the registrations may be defensive by brand owners rather than value creating. (For a discussion of alternative measures, see "The Economics of Well-Being” by Justin Fox, HBR January-February 2012.)

New signals and combinations of information, á la .tel, can be value adding for established companies as well as new ones. But switching costs will probably keep most com-branded companies from making the jump. So new companies may converge on a new gTLD that competes with .com while existing companies will more than likely register their brands under a large number of the new gTLDs as a defensive measure. Put all the registrations together and there will be enough revenues for the com-alternative gTLD to be viable.

One reason for gravitating to a com-alternative gTLD is that new companies might feel constrained by the unavailability of desired .com names and thus have a motive to find reasonable alternatives. (See Why Dominant Companies Are Vulnerable by Kyle B. Murray and Gerald Häubl, Sloan Management Review December 2011.) This is especially true because emerging brand owners don't have to acquire any new skills in order to adopt a new gTLD.

Written by Alex Tajirian, CEO at DomainMart

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Top-Level Domains

John Stankey, President and CEO, AT&T: "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year."40%, not 92%-120%. "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year," John Stankey of AT&T told investors and his CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed on the investor call. That's far less than the 92% predicted by Cisco's VNI model or the FCC's 120% to 2012 and 90% to 2013 figure in the "spectrum crunch" analysis. AT&T is easily a third of the U.S. mobile Internet and growing market share; there's no reason to think the result will be very different when we have data from others.

With growth rates less than half of the predictions, a data-driven FCC and Congress has no reason to rush to bad policy. Wireless technology is rapidly moving to sharing spectrum, whether in-building small cells, WiFi, White Spaces, Shared RAN or tools of what the engineers are calling hetnets — heterogenous networks. The last thing policymakers should do is tie up more spectrum for exclusive use; shared spectrum often yields three to ten times as much capacity.

Bad compromises on the video spectrum are unnecessary because plenty of spectrum is unused. That includes the 20 MHz that M2Z would be building out today if Julius hadn't blocked them; the 20 MHz the cable companies are sitting on and want to sell to Verizon; and the 30 MHz or so Stankey identifies as fallow at AT&T.

40% growth is still substantial, but wireless technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. LTE has about 10x the capacity of 2.5G and 4x the capacity of 3G. LTE Advanced, deploying beginning 2013 at Verizon, is designed for 10x the capacity of LTE. Putting more spectrum to use would be great, but let's do it right.

Wireless speeds are actually going up dramatically, with AT&T delivering 2-5 megabits to most of the country and Verizon's LTE delivering 5-12 megabits to 2/3rds of the population. Verizon is ahead of schedule to bring 5 megabits+ to 92% of the country in 2013 and 96-98% in 2015-2016. AT&T and Sprint have raised capex to catch up. 80%+ of the U.S. will have a 5 megabit offering in 2013-2014, 90%+ by 2015 or sooner. That's without any additional spectrum.

Today's wireless networks are designed to be shared: towers, WiFi, White Spaces, DAS and small cells all working together. The best engineers in the world are working on RAN sharing, SON, hetnets, 8x8 MIMO and techniques I'm writing about in my next book, Gigabit Wireless. AT&T in fact is one of the world leaders in DAS, WiFi and femtos and behind the scenes a key thought leader. There's wonderfully exciting stuff I'll be doing my best to translate for non-engineers.

Takeaway: The future is sharing the airwaves so let's get the policy right.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Mobile, Policy & Regulation, Telecom, White Space, Wireless

"Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so," says Professor Dave Farber who was recently interviewed by Andy Oram.

"Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching," writes Oram. "Sensor networks, smart electrical grids, and medical applications with genetic information could all increase network loads to terabits per second. When routers evolve to handle terabit-per-second rates, packet-switching protocols will become obsolete. The speed of light is constant, so we'll have to rethink the fundamentals of digital networking."

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A consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Paypal have announced that they were collaborating and coming up with a new protocol known as DMARC — the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

What is DMARC?

This is very much a summary of DMARC in a nutshell (I will probably write an article about this in the future), but from the website:

A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes — such as junk or reject the message. DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver's handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user's exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation.

When I first heard about DMARC, I said to myself "Self, why do we need another email authentication protocol?" The answer is that DMARC is not another protocol but instead leverages existing email authentication protocols and provides feedback to the spoofed domain.

SPF already provides a way to say: "If this message fails an SPF check, discard the message." It's called a Hard Fail. However, not all hard fails are illegitimate (there are significant false positives with SPF). DKIM, in itself, doesn't provide a way to discard a message if it fails an authentication check. This makes it less useful in securing the Internet (i.e., it is a barrier to adoption).

Besides which, what happens if an SPF check asses but a DKIM check doesn't? And if one of them fails, who should you tell? DMARC provides a mechanism that says: "If one of these checks fails, discard the message." But furthermore, it also provides a way to tell the responsible party that the message failed a check. For example, if security@paypal.com fails a DMARC check (either through SPF or DKIM), the email receiver can send the message to an email address that says "Hey, this message failed an SPF check. Was it legitimate or not?" If it is a false positive (perhaps a new server brought online), Paypal can add it to its SPF check. If it's a phishing message, Paypal can investigate to have the website taken down.

The strength of DMARC is that it is a stronger way to protect a brand from being abused; receivers can discard spoofed messages and senders can figure out just who, exactly, is sending mail as them.

The weak point of DMARC is, unfortunately, the weak point of SPF and DKIM — spammers and phishers don't need to spoof a domain in order to fool users into taking action. If a spammer sends mail from security@paypal.com.yakzas.com (a fictitious domain), many users just see that first part (paypal.com) without being more aware that there is more to the message.

And if a phisher signs up for a cloud service that issues temporary credentials, they can create the account paypale.onmicrosoft.com and send spam from there to avoid IP reputation blocking (and to the spammer that is abusing our Office 365 service, we know what you're doing, you jackass) while hijacking the reputation of another brand in the From address.

The strength of DMARC is not so much that it combats phishing but that if a good domain is authenticated, mail user agents (like Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc) can highlight that the sender is a trusted sender and highlight it in blue or put a little icon beside it. Since users use visual clues to make heuristic decisions, the lack of a trusted symbol can train people to be suspicious.

Anyhow, it's nice to see that the authentication/validation protocols are consolidating.

Written by Terry Zink, Program Manager

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More under: Email, Spam

Wout de Natris writes: At a speech during the Security and Defense Agenda meeting on 30 January Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, showed how the Commission envisions public-private cooperation on cyber security.

Remarks by Kroes:

"The Internet does not belong to any one group, but attacks on it affect every group. So let's work together, all sectors, all levels, public and private, national, international and European. So that we can safeguard the security of the systems that increasingly underpin our lives, today and in the future."

"In tomorrow's world, if the Internet is not secured, nothing will be."

Full statement published here.

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More under: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, Internet Governance, Malware, Policy & Regulation, Security

In the past three years, Akamai has seen 2,000% increase in the number of DDoS attack incidents investigated on behalf of its customers. The latest State of the Internet report released today by Akamai also identifies top countries from which this observed attack traffic originates, as well as the top ports targeted by these attacks.

From the report: During the third quarter of 2011, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 195 unique countries/regions, up from 192 in the second quarter. After making its first appearance in the top 10 list in recent memory in the second quarter, Indonesia vaulted to the top of the list this quarter, generating 14% of observed attack traffic. Myanmar, which had suddenly appeared at the top of the list in the prior two quarters, disappeared from the list just as suddenly in the third quarter, potentially indicating that the attack traffic that had been observed originating from the country has either been shut down, or is now coming from other places. With Myanmar dropping out of the top 10 list, South korea moved into it, more than tripling its observed level of attack traffic, responsible for 3.8% in the third quarter. In addition to South korea and Indonesia, Taiwan, China, India, and Egypt were all responsible for higher percentages of attack traffic as compared to the prior quarter.
Attack Traffic – Top Originating Countries

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Danny Sullivan has been the go-to guy for understanding the world of search for over 15 years. This week he published a really good story on Google Plus Your World. A group of engineers have launched a site called Focus on the User that shows exactly how the new Google service could be including other social media content listings besides only Google Plus, but is not.

Google Plus is of course Google's entry into the social network battle, and the service recently announced over 90 million users. Just this month Google has started inserting social media content from Google Plus listings (when available) into the search engine response pages (SERPs) on Google. However, other major sources of social media content — Facebook, Twitter — are not included.

Danny does a great job of laying out why this is overly preferential, and doesn't deliver the best search result. The engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace behind Focus on the User have developed a bookmarklet called, "Don't Be Evil, get it?" that you can add to your browser to pull more comprehensive social media listings into your personalized search results.

Danny makes a strong case this improves current search results. He provides lots of screenshots like the one below. It's important to note that the bookmarklet is using Google's own algorithmic rankings for these revised SERPs.

Danny also includes the other side of the story. Sites like Facebook and Twitter do not license their content to be crawled, so why should Google include this content?

"Google, in particular its executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has argued that it doesn't have all the data it needs to include other social services in the way it does for Google Plus. The failure to reach a deal with Facebook; the failure to renew a deal with Twitter, these have prevented the social signals it needs from being used, Google has said."

What the Focus on the User group has done is clearly demonstrated that Google could have included other content if it wanted. And to my read Danny has made a convincing argument that Google SHOULD do this, because it delivers the highest quality search results back to the user.

If legal concerns are really what is holding Google back, the company should challenge Facebook and Twitter to allow them to use the same inputs Focus on the User has accessed via the bookmarklet. If those companies refuse, then publicize that decision.

I've installed the Focus on the User tool and I'm doing my own comparisons. If anyone out there is already using it, please drop a comment with your impressions.

Written by Christopher Parente, High Tech Public Relations

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More under: Policy & Regulation, Web

Recently ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) published a report on inaccurate registration data in her own databases. Now the question is presented to the world how can we mitigate this problem? There seems to be a very easy solution.

Why register?

The question to this answer seems simple. To know who has registered with an organisation. This makes it possible to contact the registered person or organisation, to send bills and to discuss policy with the members.

The rationale of unreachable registrations

This one completely goes by me. ICANN distributes IP resources at the highest level that are on principle scarce: domain names and IP addresses and sets policy around the distribution of these resources. So it seems to be in the utmost interest of ICANN to have an accurate database. Over the past years it has been shown over and over again, that accuracy was not a priority of ICANN, even against her existing policies.

There does not seem to be a rationale for this lapses in registration measures. ICANN in the end loses money as she provides a service, but is most likely not paid for this service. Next to that it is not good for ICANN's image, as government and LEA reactions have shown over the past years. It could even become a threat to ICANN's very existence.

Cyber crime and enforcement

With the coming of cyber crime, spam and botnets, law enforcement agencies of different back ground became interested in Whois data and were very much frustrated when they found data not to be accurate. (And vetting and revocation mechanisms not being in place.) Whois data is a primary source at the start of investigations. So if these are false this makes investigations harder, not impossible.

Inaccurate data

What can be reasons that data is inaccurate? There can be several reasons. To give a few examples. Someone forgot to change the data after a move of the office, contact person, a merger, bank account, a company stopped its activities, etc. In the meantime the IP resources are still used as they were meant to, but from an unknown address.

A second reason could be that free speech advocates want to have a chance to hide their identity behind a so called proxy registration. This way they are safe from prosecution in their home country. Usually this is supported by western governments.

A third reason can be criminal intent. A person or group of persons uses the IP resources for personal gain through illegal activities. They never intended to provide accurate data. From a society point of view this is an activity that preferably is stopped as fast as possible.

What to do about it?

We are discussing unreachable registered companies. It looks quite simple to me. ICANN has many ways to reach out to these companies and does so. Everyone concerned gets one year to alter the data. As soon as someone complies, the data is submitted to the Whois database, after being vetted by ICANN.

All that have not updated their registration on time -and one year is a very lenient time frame- are de-registered by ICANN and where possible their IP resources taken away.

Legit after claims

If ICANN makes sure there's a good procedure to follow for legit claims after the de-registration that come in anyway, I'm sure this procedure will work. Criminals usually do not show up and try to find new ways to proceed their business.

Vetting of all new registrations

When ICANN makes sure new applicants are vetted before being admitted and an ongoing checking procedure of existing members is put in place, I'm convinced that the Internet will become a safer place for all concerned. Also, she becomes an example for policy at lower level IP resource organisations by setting a standard. It makes one avenue on the Internet harder to reach for criminals.

Written by Wout de Natris, Consultant international cooperation cyber crime + trainer spam enforcement

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More under: Cybercrime, Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, IP Addressing, Policy & Regulation, Whois