There is nothing worse than showing up to a party uninvited.
The awkward conversations, the constant justification of why you’re there, and often facing up to the downright hostility of the hosts. It’s enough to make any of us want to quietly make our way towards the closest exit sign we find and never look back.
And that’s exactly what’s happening to many women around the world for simply taking the time to log on.
For those of us that work with the online world, there isn’t any doubt. Online harassment and cyber bullying are real. In theory, these things can happen to anyone— but they don’t.
They happen overwhelmingly to women.
The European Union today faces a number of serious challenges including growing levels of populism and the threat of foreign intervention through cyber-attacks. Last year’s alleged Russian-led cyberattacks on US Democratic Party servers as well as Chinese government cyber espionage against other governments and companies have provided worrying precedents. Although it is hard to measure the actual impact these attacks had on the election results in the US, concerns are growing amongst European leaders that their electoral procedures are vulnerable to manipulation.
I recently attended the DNS Privacy Workshop colocated with this year’s NDSS 2017 in San Diego, California. DNS privacy has received considerable attention from researchers and engineers since the Snowden revelations of state-backed pervasive surveillance in 2013 and the workshop covered a lot of ground.
The word Internet is short for internetwork. It’s just a network of networks. So the more places you can connect those networks, the more robust the whole system is. That’s what Internet Exchange Points (“IXPs”) are. They’re the connection points where networks can connect to each other, and they’re a crucial part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
In Europe, IXPs have traditionally been independent and are often run as nonprofits, whereas in North America, they’ve typically been owned and operated by commercial colocation facility operators or Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the last several years, though, there’s been a movement in the US to build more independent, community-focused IXPs. IX-Denver is part of that movement.
After a long wait of 4.5 years, the 29th edition of SANOG came back to Pakistan, this time in the countrys capital, Islamabad. The Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) and the Higher Education commission of Pakistan (HEC) came forward to jointly host the event at the HEC headquarters.
SANOG 29 consisted of two days of conference, one day of tutorial alongside the Internet Society's ION Conference, and the usual five days of workshops with three parallel tracks. Eight days of action-packed agenda was good enough to attract a lot of audiences.
That was the question Bruce Schneier and I were asked by Craig Spietzle of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) during a panel he moderated recently at the RSA conference.
My answer to that question was “an unequivocal yes!” Below is the longer answer. The key lies in accountability.
The digitalization of human activities, from social interactions to industrial processes, has led to unprecedented levels of data collection. New data is constantly being produced, driven by the rise of user-generated content, the digitalization of industries and services, and the improvement of both machine to machine communication and data storage. As recognized in the Commission’s Communication “Towards a data-driven economy”, this trend “holds enormous potential in various fields, ranging from health, food security, energy efficiency to intelligent transport systems and smart cities”. Indeed, data has become an essential resource for societal improvement.
This week the mobile industry will meet at their annual gathering in Barcelona and I am excited to be there. Mobile has changed my life as it has changed that of the 63% of the world population. For the last two decades, I and billions of people around the world have been able to be reached by others and to reach others almost anytime and anywhere. This was unimaginable just three decades ago.
Mobile has also become the method of choice to access the Internet. In fact, very often it is the only method to access the Internet. Without mobile technology, it would have been impossible to reach internet access rates close to 30% in Africa within just a few years.
Akamai has published its Q4 2016 State of the Internet/Security report As always, an interesting read and an opportunity to look at trends in attacks.
Not all trends are up and to the right. As the report states, Q4 2016 was "the third consecutive quarter where we noticed a decrease in the number of attack triggers". Still, "the overall 2016 attack count was up 4% as compared to 2015". Also, the volume and number of "mega-attacks" is on the rise.
"What's the harm in giving up my Twitter password?", you might say, "all someone can do is see my direct messages and post a tweet from me, right?"
Think again. The reality today is that social media services are used for far more than just posting updates or photos of cats. They also act as "identity providers" allowing us to easily login to other sites and services.
We've all seen the "Login with Twitter" or "Continue with Facebook" buttons on various sites. Or for Google or LinkedIn. These offer a tremendous convenience. You can rapidly sign into sites without having to remember yet-another-password.
But...
... if you give your passwords to your social media accounts to someone, they could potentially[1]:
A number of seminal papers appeared towards the end of the 20th century calling for more attention to be paid to the human in the security loop. For example, Anne Adams and Angela Sasse’s “Users are not the Enemy” and Mark Ackerman and Lorrie Cranor’s "Privacy critics: UI components to safeguard users' privacy." The research field of Usable Security was thereby launched, and quickly garnered interest amongst academics and in industry. Almost two decades later this field has achieved independent status with a number of conferences and workshops being dedicated to this research field.
Today, the Internet Society, along with 50 organizations and trade associations and nearly 90 individual experts who care deeply about an open, trusted Internet, expressed our deep concerns that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security may require individuals to disclose their social media account passwords as a condition of entry into the United States. Last week, the new U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security indicated that the U.S. government is considering such a policy as an element of border screening.
Today at the RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco, our Chief Internet Technology Officer Olaf Kolkman will be speaking as part of a panel on:
Internet of Insecurity: Can Industry Solve It or Is Regulation Required?
The abstract of the session is:
The United Nations estimates that one in six people (in Asia and the Pacific) live with disability – that is a total of 650 million people. Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) often face barriers that restrict them from participating in society on an equal basis, including the access to, and use of, information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Date: 26-28 July 2017
Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Venue: TBC
What is the Africa DNS Forum?
The Africa Domain Name System Forum is an annual open event for stakeholders in the Domain Name Industry in Africa organized by Africa Top Level Domains Organization (AfTLD), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Society. The objective of the three-day event is to help the African domain name industry in Africa to grow at a competitive rate and ensure that the continent is on par with the rest of the world.
Who should attend?
Community established networks are emerging and evolving in Africa as a sustainable solution to address the existing connectivity gaps. 37 community networks initiatives have so far been identified in 12 African countries, of which 25 are considered active trying to set up or improve their own telecommunications infrastructure to connect the unconnected.
One of the goals of the Internet Society is to help expand connectivity and promote increased collaboration between community network operators in the region as well as provide an opportunity for them to engage with other stakeholders.
“The voices of young people are not heard when it comes to Internet policy” said Carlos Guerrero, project manager of the Youth Observatory. “We are the generation that has been using the Internet since we were children, and we are the ones who will be using it for the next 50 years. Our voice matters.”
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2017) is just around the corner (26 February - 1 March), and details of the program are quickly coming into focus. The full slate of activities includes two keynotes, two workshops, and a full program of excellent peer-reviewed academic research papers.