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posted by Blackmoore on Friday December 19 2014, @12:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the constant-vigilance dept.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), one of the core entities for Internet governance and operations, announced that it had been compromied in late November via a "Spear-Phishing" attack.

They state that the compromised credentials were used to access more sensitive systems. Specifically, they mention:

The attacker obtained administrative access to all files in the CZDS [Centralized Zone Data System]. This included copies of the zone files in the system, as well as information entered by users such as name, postal address, email address, fax and telephone numbers, username, and password. Although the passwords were stored as salted cryptographic hashes, we have deactivated all CZDS passwords as a precaution. Users may request a new password at czds.icann.org. We suggest that CZDS users take appropriate steps to protect any other online accounts for which they might have used the same username and/or password. ICANN is providing notices to the CZDS users whose personal information may have been compromised.

They also identified unauthorized access to (ostensibly innocuous parts of) the ICANN GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] Wiki as well as user-level accounts on the ICANN Blog and the ICANN WHOIS information portal.

While they're not terribly specific about how the attack happened aside from mentioning that the "email credentials of several ICANN staff members" were compromised, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out where it probably went from there. The impact seems rather minimal, but given the level of control that ICANN has over DNS, it does make one wonder how close we came to a major incident.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday December 19 2014, @03:41AM

    by anubi (2828) on Friday December 19 2014, @03:41AM (#127371) Journal

    I considered that as well, however I also felt he would be getting a lot of unjustified hate mail. At least I wanted him to know there are a few of us who know the dilemma he in the middle of.

    As far as that honeypot goes... this one not just for spam but for these dedicated fraud attempts. As much as we have given the NSA powers to snoop on everything, I would sure like to see some government authority we could forward these deliberate fraud attempts to, then they would play the patsy, make the perp think he found a pushover, then nail him in the act.

    Once word spreads around that trying to phish people is likely to get one nailed the instant they try to collect their ill-gotten gain, sending a phish email will be just as risky as opening up a the attached Microsoft document. One helluva surprise awaits.

    Spam is one thing, but phishing like this is fraud... plain and simple fraud.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]