Information Technology Security

 By  KrebsOnSecurity More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds. Your Web browser knows how to find a site like example.com thanks to the global Domain Name System (DNS), which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly website names (example.com) into numeric Internet addresses. When someone registers a domain name, the registrar will typically provide two sets of DNS records that the customer then needs to assign to their domain. Those records are crucial because they allow Web browsers to find the Internet address of the hosting provider that is serving that domain. But potential problems can arise when a domain’s DNS records are “lame,” meaning the authoritative name server does not have enough informatio...

By Leah Nulen, Politico The most popular websites are about to get more expensive because of a no-bid deal between the Trump administration and the company that holds a monopoly on managing a prime part of the internet. And the Biden team isn’t sure it can back out of the arrangement. Planned price spikes by Verisign in the coming years may add just a few dollars to the cost of registering or renewing an internet addressing ending in “.com.” But critics say that extra expense — totaling an estimated $85 million for the first year alone — will cascade through the online economy, ultimately hitting consumers. And they fault the U.S. government for not even trying to get a better deal by bidding out the contract that Verisign has held for more than two decades. “When it’s a government monopoly, you should have some mechanism to protect the consumer interests,” said Deb Garza, a former federal antitrust official who had been involved in contract discussions with Verisign during the George...