The CZ.NIC Association used the Safer Internet Day to introduce its new project, aimed at children´s safety online. The CZ.NIC Association acts as a coordinator of the project that started on 1 January 2019, another partner is the Safety Line, ensuring the operation of a helpline. CZ.NIC will continue operating the Czech national hot-line STOPonline.cz, which received a record number of reports last year.
From the life of an online wanderer
Today, I would like to go back to the topic I brought up in my earlier blog post. At that time, I was horribly angry at the administrators of photo sharing servers. I was angry at the absence of better mechanisms to check the photos people upload. Why don’t they have a person who would take a look at them? Why don’t the make the albums private by default? I could go on, but after almost two years of what seemed like fighting windmills, I have realized one thing. It’s not the administrators’ or providers’ fault — everyone is responsible for their own actions.
Household routers face more than 250 attacks daily
Vulnerability of SOHO routers becomes a topic of analyses by various security organizations almost every week. The 2017 Symantec report shows a year-on-year increase in the number of attacks on IoT devices by 600%. The most vulnerable are unsecured routers, which often make it possible to gain easy access to each connected device. The April’s alert from the official US-CERT also tells us of the growing number of these attacks and their severity.
When it comes to cyber security in high schools, we have a lot to catch up on
There is no doubt that high school students use information and communication technology just as commonly as a toothbrush. Unfortunately, when it comes to security, there is really room for improvement. This was confirmed by the National Final of the second Czech Cyber Security Competition among high schools.
Which MOX is the right one for you?
We launched the campaign for Turris MOX – modular and open source router. As modularity is something new in this field, some users are quite confused and don’t know what should they pick. This article is here to help you a little bit decide which combination is the right one for you and help you understand why would you actually want modularity.
Together for better stability, speed and further extensibility of the DNS ecosystem
Over past years, various DNS software developers tried to solve the problems with the interoperability of the DNS protocol and especially its EDNS extension (RFC 6891 standard), by temporary workarounds, which aimed to lend their software an ability to temporarily accept various non-standard behaviors. Unfortunately, time has shown that this attitude of adding temporary workarounds is not a long-term solution, especially because the implementations not fully complying with standards were seemingly functional and there was no reason for a permanent fix. The result of these makeshift solutions is their accumulation in the DNS software, leading to a situation where there are so many of them that they themselves begin to cause problems. The most obvious problem is slower response to DNS queries and the impossibility to deploy new DNS protocol feature called DNS Cookies, which would help reduce DDoS attacks based on DNS protocol abuse.
Czech SIC votes for age 13
Czech children under age 13 who use Facebook or Instagram are less than four months away from becoming lawbreakers. What makes the situation even worse is the fact that unless a law is passed by this May that would set the threshold for the use of social networking services to 13 years, from that point their use, along with other services, will become illegal for every person aged from 13 to 16 who does not obtain consent of their parents. This issue has already been addressed in our blog by our colleague Jiří Průša. But let’s go deeper.
Welcome HaaS
Or, to be exact, you could welcome it last October, when we released its beta version. In the beginning, we were debugging it, while leaving the registration free, then came the stress test in the form of moving of all users of the Turris routers. We resolved all the issues and considered the suggestions, so nothing was in the way of launching HaaS — Honeypot as a Service.
Suricon: Practical experience with cybersecurity in manufacturing and companies
One of the most comprehensive open source intrusion detection systems Suricata held its annual conference in Prague. And because CZ.NIC intensively uses Suricata in its Turris routers to protect users, we have become a proud partner of the event. There, we shared our experience with other Suricata users and showed the technological solution of the Turris Omnia router, where Suricata can be operated with ease.
Looking back at the Cybercompetition finale
A golden opportunity: the bank we’re about to rob is moving to new premises today. To our luck, they’re also testing alarms until 4 PM, so it won’t be suspicious if we accidentally set one off. There is an open window on the first floor protected by a single sensor. Our inside man among the staff has placed an IP camera into the sensor cabinet, so we can see if the sensor we are trying to break has the ‘status OK’ or the alarm is screaming. The IP camera is streaming to YouTube — alas with a delay. The problem is that the sensor communicates via radio waves: every 15 to 30 seconds the diode beeps and the device sends a signal. We’re listening, trying to imitate it, and when we’re sure, we’re gonna shut down the sensor and turn on our little imitation that we built. What is left is just to arrange the tin foil between the antennas, like this… the sensor alarm’s blaring! We are holding our ears and will try again in half a minute.