Internet – CyberSecurity Confabulation

It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein:

So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password.

In fact this was the first password on Arpanet. It proved invaluable in satisfying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for the 15 years I ran the service during which no security breach occurred over my link. I also put in place a system of governance that any UK users had to be approved by a committee which I chaired but which also had UK government and British Post Office representation.

I wish he’d told us what that password was.

Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious

Posted 8 months ago by Bruce Schneier

6.8%, to be precise.

From ZDNet:

However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be cybercriminals’ weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4.5 million unique DDoS attacks. That total is nearly a third of all the DDoS attacks they mitigated the previous year.

But it’s not just about the sheer volume of DDoS attacks. The sophistication of these attacks is increasing, too. Last August, Cloudflare mitigated a massive HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS attack that peaked at 201 million requests per second (RPS). That number is three times bigger than any previously observed attack.

It wasn’t just Cloudflare that was hit by the largest DDoS attack in its history. Google Cloud reported the same attack peaked at an astonishing 398 million RPS. So, how big is that number? According to Google, Google Cloud was slammed by more RPS in two minutes than Wikipedia saw traffic during September 2023.

Google Reportedly Disconnecting Employees from the Internet

Posted 2 years ago by Bruce Schneier

Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers:

The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job will get exceptions, the company stated in materials.

Google has not confirmed this story.