Microsoft today released a bundle of security updates to fix at least 67 holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software, including one dangerous flaw that Microsoft warns is actively being exploited. Meanwhile, as it usually does on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday — the second Tuesday of each month — Adobe has a new Flash Player update that addresses a single but critical security weakness.

First, the Flash Tuesday update, which brings Flash Player to v. 29.0.0.171. Some (present company included) would argue that Flash Player is itself “a single but critical security weakness.” Nevertheless, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge ship with their own versions of Flash, which get updated automatically when new versions of these browsers are made available.

You can check if your browser has Flash installed/enabled and what version it’s at by pointing your browser at this link. Adobe is phasing out Flash entirely by 2020, but most of the major browsers already take steps to hobble Flash. And with good reason: It’s a major security liability.

Google Chrome blocks Flash from running on all but a handful of popular sites, and then only after user approval. Disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough. Paste “chrome://settings/content” into a Chrome browser bar and then select “Flash” from the list of items. By default it should be set to “Ask first” before running Flash, although users also can disable Flash entirely here or whitelist/blacklist specific sites. If you spot an upward pointing arrow to the right of the address bar in Chrome, that means there’s an update to the browser available, and it’s time to restart Chrome.

For Windows users with Mozilla Firefox installed, the browser prompts users to enable Flash on a per-site basis.

Through the end of 2017 and into 2018, Microsoft Edge will continue to ask users for permission to run Flash on most sites the first time the site is visited, and will remember the user’s preference on subsequent visits. Microsoft users will need to install this month’s batch of patches to get the latest Flash version for IE/Edge, where most of the critical updates in this month’s patch batch reside.

According to security vendor Qualys, one Microsoft patch in particular deserves priority over others in organizations that are testing updates before deploying them: CVE-2018-8174 involves a problem with the way the Windows scripting engine handles certain objects, and Microsoft says this bug is already being exploited in active attacks.

Some other useful sources of information on today’s updates include the Zero Day Initiative and Bleeping Computer. And of course there is always the Microsoft Security Update Guide.

As always, please feel free to leave a comment below if you experience any issues applying any of these updates.

A monster distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against KrebsOnSecurity.com in 2016 knocked this site offline for nearly four days. The attack was executed through a network of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as Internet routers, security cameras and digital video recorders. A new study that tries to measure the direct cost of that one attack for IoT device users whose machines were swept up in the assault found that it may have cost device owners a total of $323,973.75 in excess power and added bandwidth consumption.

My bad.

But really, none of it was my fault at all. It was mostly the fault of IoT makers for shipping cheap, poorly designed products (insecure by default), and the fault of customers who bought these IoT things and plugged them onto the Internet without changing the things’ factory settings (passwords at least.)

The botnet that hit my site in Sept. 2016 was powered by the first version of Mirai, a malware strain that wriggles into dozens of IoT devices left exposed to the Internet and running with factory-default settings and passwords. Systems infected with Mirai are forced to scan the Internet for other vulnerable IoT devices, but they’re just as often used to help launch punishing DDoS attacks.

By the time of the first Mirai attack on this site, the young masterminds behind Mirai had already enslaved more than 600,000 IoT devices for their DDoS armies. But according to an interview with one of the admitted and convicted co-authors of Mirai, the part of their botnet that pounded my site was a mere slice of firepower they’d sold for a few hundred bucks to a willing buyer. The attack army sold to this ne’er-do-well harnessed the power of just 24,000 Mirai-infected systems (mostly security cameras and DVRs, but some routers, too).

These 24,000 Mirai devices clobbered my site for several days with data blasts of up to 620 Gbps. The attack was so bad that my pro-bono DDoS protection provider at the time — Akamai — had to let me go because the data firehose pointed at my site was starting to cause real pain for their paying customers. Akamai later estimated that the cost of maintaining protection against my site in the face of that onslaught would have run into the millions of dollars.

We’re getting better at figuring out the financial costs of DDoS attacks to the victims (5, 6 or 7 -digit dollar losses) and to the perpetrators (zero to hundreds of dollars). According to a report released this year by DDoS mitigation giant NETSCOUT Arbor, fifty-six percent of organizations last year experienced a financial impact from DDoS attacks for between $10,000 and $100,000, almost double the proportion from 2016.

But what if there were also a way to work out the cost of these attacks to the users of the IoT devices which get snared by DDos botnets like Mirai? That’s what researchers at University of California, Berkeley School of Information sought to determine in their new paper, “rIoT: Quantifying Consumer Costs of Insecure Internet of Things Devices.”

If we accept the UC Berkeley team’s assumptions about costs borne by hacked IoT device users (more on that in a bit), the total cost of added bandwidth and energy consumption from the botnet that hit my site came to $323,973.95. This may sound like a lot of money, but remember that broken down among 24,000 attacking drones the per-device cost comes to just $13.50.

So let’s review: The attacker who wanted to clobber my site paid a few hundred dollars to rent a tiny portion of a much bigger Mirai crime machine. That attack would likely have cost millions of dollars to mitigate. The consumers in possession of the IoT devices that did the attacking probably realized a few dollars in losses each, if that. Perhaps forever unmeasured are the many Web sites and Internet users whose connection speeds are often collateral damage in DDoS attacks.

Anyone noticing a slight asymmetry here in either costs or incentives? IoT security is what’s known as an “externality,” a term used to describe “positive or negative consequences to third parties that result from an economic transaction. When one party does not bear the full costs of its actions, it has inadequate incentives to avoid actions that incur those costs.”

In many cases negative externalities are synonymous with problems that the free market has a hard time rewarding individuals or companies for fixing or ameliorating, much like environmental pollution. The common theme with externalities is that the pain points to fix the problem are so diffuse and the costs borne by the problem so distributed across international borders that doing something meaningful about it often takes a global effort with many stakeholders — who can hopefully settle upon concrete steps for action and metrics to measure success.

The paper’s authors explain the misaligned incentives on two sides of the IoT security problem:

-“On the manufacturer side, many devices run lightweight Linux-based operating systems that open doors for hackers. Some consumer IoT devices implement minimal security. For example, device manufacturers may use default username and password credentials to access the device. Such design decisions simplify device setup and troubleshooting, but they also leave the device open to exploitation by hackers with access to the publicly-available or guessable credentials.”

-“Consumers who expect IoT devices to act like user-friendly ‘plug-and-play’ conveniences may have sufficient intuition to use the device but insufficient technical knowledge to protect or update it. Externalities may arise out of information asymmetries caused by hidden information or misaligned incentives. Hidden information occurs when consumers cannot discern product characteristics and, thus, are unable to purchase products that reflect their preferences. When consumers are unable to observe the security qualities of software, they instead purchase products based solely on price, and the overall quality of software in the market suffers.”

The UK Berkeley researchers concede that their experiments — in which they measured the power output and bandwidth consumption of various IoT devices they’d infected with a sandboxed version of Mirai — suggested that the scanning and DDoSsing activity prompted by a Mirai malware infection added almost negligible amounts in power consumption for the infected devices.

Thus, most of the loss figures cited for the 2016 attack rely heavily on estimates of how much the excess bandwidth created by a Mirai infection might cost users directly, and as such I suspect the $13.50 per machine estimates are on the high side.

No doubt, some Internet users get online via an Internet service provider that includes a daily “bandwidth cap,” such that over-use of the allotted daily bandwidth amount can incur overage fees and/or relegates the customer to a slower, throttled connection for some period after the daily allotted bandwidth overage.

But for a majority of high-speed Internet users, the added bandwidth use from a router or other IoT device on the network being infected with Mirai probably wouldn’t show up as an added line charge on their monthly bills. I asked the researchers about the considerable wiggle factor here:

“Regarding bandwidth consumption, the cost may not ever show up on a consumer’s bill, especially if the consumer has no bandwidth cap,” reads an email from the UC Berkeley researchers who wrote the report, including Kim Fong, Kurt Hepler, Rohit Raghavan and Peter Rowland.

“We debated a lot on how to best determine and present bandwidth costs, as it does vary widely among users and ISPs,” they continued. “Costs are more defined in cases where bots cause users to exceed their monthly cap. But even if a consumer doesn’t directly pay a few extra dollars at the end of the month, the infected device is consuming actual bandwidth that must be supplied/serviced by the ISP. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that ISPs will eventually pass their increased costs onto consumers as higher monthly fees, etc. It’s difficult to quantify the consumer-side costs of unauthorized use — which is likely why there’s not much existing work — and our stats are definitely an estimate, but we feel it’s helpful in starting the discussion on how to quantify these costs.”

Measuring bandwidth and energy consumption may turn out to be a useful and accepted tool to help more accurately measure the full costs of DDoS attacks. I’d love to see these tests run against a broader range of IoT devices in a much larger simulated environment.

If the Berkeley method is refined enough to become accepted as one of many ways to measure actual losses from a DDoS attack, the reporting of such figures could make these crimes more likely to be prosecuted.

Many DDoS attack investigations go nowhere because targets of these attacks fail to come forward or press charges, making it difficult for prosecutors to prove any real economic harm was done. Since many of these investigations die on the vine for a lack of financial damages reaching certain law enforcement thresholds to justify a federal prosecution (often $50,000 – $100,000), factoring in estimates of the cost to hacked machine owners involved in each attack could change that math.

But the biggest levers for throttling the DDoS problem are in the hands of the people running the world’s largest ISPs, hosting providers and bandwidth peering points on the Internet today. Some of those levers I detailed in the “Shaming the Spoofers” section of The Democraticization of Censorship, the first post I wrote after the attack and after Google had brought this site back online under its Project Shield program.

By the way, we should probably stop referring to IoT devices as “smart” when they start misbehaving within three minutes of being plugged into an Internet connection. That’s about how long your average cheapo, factory-default security camera plugged into the Internet has before getting successfully taken over by Mirai. In short, dumb IoT devices are those that don’t make it easy for owners to use them safely without being a nuisance or harm to themselves or others.

Maybe what we need to fight this onslaught of dumb devices are more network operators turning to ideas like IDIoT, a network policy enforcement architecture for consumer IoT devices that was first proposed in December 2017.  The goal of IDIoT is to restrict the network capabilities of IoT devices to only what is essential for regular device operation. For example, it might be okay for network cameras to upload a video file somewhere, but it’s definitely not okay for that camera to then go scanning the Web for other cameras to infect and enlist in DDoS attacks.

So what does all this mean to you? That depends on how many IoT things you and your family and friends are plugging into the Internet and your/their level of knowledge about how to secure and maintain these devices. Here’s a primer on minimizing the chances that your orbit of IoT things become a security liability for you or for the Internet at large.

Twitter just asked all 300+ million users to reset their passwords, citing the exposure of user passwords via a bug that stored passwords in plain text — without protecting them with any sort of encryption technology that would mask a Twitter user’s true password. The social media giant says it has fixed the bug and that so far its investigation hasn’t turned up any signs of a breach or that anyone misused the information. But if you have a Twitter account, please change your account password now.

Or if you don’t trust links in blogs like this (I get it) go to Twitter.com and change it from there. And then come back and read the rest of this. We’ll wait.

In a post to its company blog this afternoon, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal wrote:

“When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.”

Agrawal explains that Twitter normally masks user passwords through a state-of-the-art encryption technology called “bcrypt,” which replaces the user’s password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system.

“This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password,” said Agrawal, who says the technology they’re using to mask user passwords is the industry standard.

“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process,” he continued. “We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”

Agrawal wrote that while Twitter has no reason to believe password information ever left Twitter’s systems or was misused by anyone, the company is still urging all Twitter users to reset their passwords NOW.

Twitter advises:
-Change your password on Twitter and on any other service where you may have used the same password.
-Use a strong password that you don’t reuse on other websites.
–Enable login verification, also known as two factor authentication. This is the single best action you can take to increase your account security.
-Use a password manager to make sure you’re using strong, unique passwords everywhere.

This may be much ado about nothing disclosed out of an abundance of caution, or further investigation may reveal different findings. It doesn’t matter for right now: If you’re a Twitter user and if you didn’t take my advice to go change your password yet, go do it now! That is, if you can.

Twitter.com seems responsive now, but some period of time Thursday afternoon Twitter had problems displaying many Twitter profiles, or even its homepage. Just a few moments ago, I tried to visit the Twitter CTO’s profile page and got this (ditto for Twitter.com):

If for some reason you can’t reach Twitter.com, try again soon. Put it on your to-do list or calendar for an hour from now. Seriously, do it now or very soon.

And please don’t use a password that you have used for any other account you use online, either in the past or in the present. A non-comprehensive list (note to self) of some password tips are here.

I have sent some more specific questions about this incident in to Twitter. More updates as available.

Update, 8:04 p.m. ET: Went to reset my password at Twitter and it said my new password was strong, but when I submitted it I was led to a dead page. But after logging in again at twitter.com the new password worked (and the old didn’t anymore). Then it prompted me to enter one-time code from app (you do have 2-factor set up on Twitter, right?) Password successfully changed!

Storing passwords in plaintext online is never a good idea, but it’s remarkable how many companies have employees who are doing just that using online collaboration tools like Trello.com. Last week, KrebsOnSecurity notified a host of companies that employees were using Trello to share passwords for sensitive internal resources. Among those put at risk by such activity included an insurance firm, a state government agency and ride-hailing service Uber.

By default, Trello boards for both enterprise and personal use are set to either private (requires a password to view the content) or team-visible only (approved members of the collaboration team can view).

But that doesn’t stop individual Trello users from manually sharing personal boards that include proprietary employer data, information that may be indexed by search engines and available to anyone with a Web browser. And unfortunately for organizations, far too many employees are posting sensitive internal passwords and other resources on their own personal Trello boards that are left open and exposed online.

KrebsOnSecurity spent the past week using Google to discover unprotected personal Trello boards that listed employer passwords and other sensitive data. Pictured above was a personal board set up by some Uber developers in the company’s Asia-Pacific region, which included passwords needed to view a host of internal Google Documents and images.

Uber spokesperson Melanie Ensign said the Trello board in question was made private shortly after being notified by this publication, among others. Ensign said Uber found the unauthorized Trello board exposed information related to two users in South America who have since been notified.

“We had a handful of members in random parts of the world who didn’t realize they were openly sharing this information,” Ensign said. “We’ve reached out to these teams to remind people that these things need to happen behind internal resources. Employee awareness is an ongoing challenge, We may have dodged a bullet here, and it definitely could have been worse.”

Ensign said the initial report about the exposed board came through the company’s bug bounty program, and that the person who reported it would receive at least the minimum bounty amount — $500 — for reporting the incident (Uber hasn’t yet decided whether the award should be higher for this incident).

The Uber employees who created the board “used their work email to open a public board that they weren’t supposed to,” Ensign said. “They didn’t go through our enterprise account to create that. We first found out about it through our bug bounty program, and while it’s not technically a vulnerability in our products, it’s certainly something that we would pay for anyway. In this case, we got multiple reports about the same thing, but we always pay the first report we get.”

Of course, not every company has a bug bounty program to incentivize the discovery and private reporting of internal resources that may be inadvertently exposed online.

Screenshots that KrebsOnSecurity took of many far more shocking examples of employees posting dozens of passwords for sensitive internal resources are not pictured here because the affected parties still have not responded to alerts provided by this author.

Trello is one of many online collaboration tools made by Atlassian Corporation PLC, a technology company based in Sydney, Australia. Trello co-founder Michael Pryor said Trello boards are set to private by default and must be manually changed to public by the user.

“We strive to make sure public boards are being created intentionally and have built in safeguards to confirm the intention of a user before they make a board publicly visible,” Pryor said. “Additionally, visibility settings are displayed persistently on the top of every board.”

Interestingly, updates made to Trello’s privacy policy over the past weekend may make it easier for companies to locate personal boards created by employees and pull them behind company resources.

A Trello spokesperson said the privacy changes were made to bring the company’s policies in line with new EU privacy laws that come into enforcement later this month. But they also clarify that Trello’s enterprise features allow the enterprise admins to control the security and permissions around a work account an employee may have created before the enterprise product was purchased.

Uber spokesperson Ensign called the changes welcome.

“As a result companies will have more security control over Trello boards created by current/former employees and contractors, so we’re happy to see the change,” she said.

On two occasions this past year I’ve published stories here warning about the prospect that new European privacy regulations could result in more spams and scams ending up in your inbox. This post explains in a question and answer format some of the reasoning that went into that prediction, and responds to many of the criticisms leveled against it.

Before we get to the Q&A, a bit of background is in order. On May 25, 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect. The law, enacted by the European Parliament, requires companies to get affirmative consent for any personal information they collect on people within the European Union. Organizations that violate the GDPR could face fines of up to four percent of global annual revenues.

In response, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the nonprofit entity that manages the global domain name system — has proposed redacting key bits of personal data from WHOIS, the system for querying databases that store the registered users of domain names and blocks of Internet address ranges (IP addresses).

Under current ICANN rules, domain name registrars should collect and display a variety of data points when someone performs a WHOIS lookup on a given domain, such as the registrant’s name, address, email address and phone number. Most registrars offer a privacy protection service that shields this information from public WHOIS lookups; some registrars charge a nominal fee for this service, while others offer it for free.

But in a bid to help registrars comply with the GDPR, ICANN is moving forward on a plan to remove critical data elements from all public WHOIS records. Under the new system, registrars would collect all the same data points about their customers, yet limit how much of that information is made available via public WHOIS lookups.

The data to be redacted includes the name of the person who registered the domain, as well as their phone number, physical address and email address. The new rules would apply to all domain name registrars globally.

ICANN has proposed creating an “accreditation system” that would vet access to personal data in WHOIS records for several groups, including journalists, security researchers, and law enforcement officials, as well as intellectual property rights holders who routinely use WHOIS records to combat piracy and trademark abuse.

But at an ICANN meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico last month, ICANN representatives conceded that a proposal for how such a vetting system might work probably would not be ready until December 2018. Assuming ICANN meets that deadline, it could be many months after that before the hundreds of domain registrars around the world take steps to adopt the new measures.

In a series of posts on Twitter, I predicted that the WHOIS changes coming with GDPR will likely result in a noticeable increase in cybercrime — particularly in the form of phishing and other types of spam. In response to those tweets, several authors on Wednesday published an article for Georgia Tech’s Internet Governance Project titled, “WHOIS afraid of the dark? Truth or illusion, let’s know the difference when it comes to WHOIS.”

The following Q&A is intended to address many of the more misleading claims and assertions made in that article.

Cyber criminals don’t use their real information in WHOIS registrations, so what’s the big deal if the data currently available in WHOIS records is no longer in the public domain after May 25?

I can point to dozens of stories printed here — and probably hundreds elsewhere — that clearly demonstrate otherwise. Whether or not cyber crooks do provide their real information is beside the point. ANY information they provide — and especially information that they re-use across multiple domains and cybercrime campaigns — is invaluable to both grouping cybercriminal operations and in ultimately identifying who’s responsible for these activities.

To understand why data reuse in WHOIS records is so common among crooks, put yourself in the shoes of your average scammer or spammer — someone who has to register dozens or even hundreds or thousands of domains a week to ply their trade. Are you going to create hundreds or thousands of email addresses and fabricate as many personal details to make your WHOIS listings that much harder for researchers to track? The answer is that those who take this extraordinary step are by far and away the exception rather than the rule. Most simply reuse the same email address and phony address/phone/contact information across many domains as long as it remains profitable for them to do so.

This pattern of WHOIS data reuse doesn’t just extend across a few weeks or months. Very often, if a spammer, phisher or scammer can get away with re-using the same WHOIS details over many years without any deleterious effects to their operations, they will happily do so. Why they may do this is their own business, but nevertheless it makes WHOIS an incredibly powerful tool for tracking threat actors across multiple networks, registrars and Internet epochs.

All domain registrars offer free or a-la-carte privacy protection services that mask the personal information provided by the domain registrant. Most cybercriminals — unless they are dumb or lazy — are already taking advantage of these anyway, so it’s not clear why masking domain registration for everyone is going to change the status quo by much. 

It is true that some domain registrants do take advantage of WHOIS privacy services, but based on countless investigations I have conducted using WHOIS to uncover cybercrime businesses and operators, I’d wager that cybercrooks more often do not use these services. Not infrequently, when they do use WHOIS privacy options there are still gaps in coverage at some point in the domain’s history (such as when a registrant switches hosting providers) which are indexed by historic WHOIS records and that offer a brief window of visibility into the details behind the registration.

This is demonstrably true even for organized cybercrime groups and for nation state actors, and these are arguably some of the most sophisticated and savvy cybercriminals out there.

It’s worth adding that if so many cybercrooks seem nonchalant about adopting WHOIS privacy services it may well be because they reside in countries where the rule of law is not well-established, or their host country doesn’t particularly discourage their activities so long as they’re not violating the golden rule — namely, targeting people in their own backyard. And so they may not particularly care about covering their tracks. Or in other cases they do care, but nevertheless make mistakes or get sloppy at some point, as most cybercriminals do.

The GDPR does not apply to businesses — only to individuals — so there is no reason researchers or anyone else should be unable to find domain registration details for organizations and companies in the WHOIS database after May 25, right?

It is true that the European privacy regulations as they relate to WHOIS records do not apply to businesses registering domain names. However, the domain registrar industry — which operates on razor-thin profit margins and which has long sought to be free from any WHOIS requirements or accountability whatsoever — won’t exactly be tripping over themselves to add more complexity to their WHOIS efforts just to make a distinction between businesses and individuals.

As a result, registrars simply won’t make that distinction because there is no mandate that they must. They’ll just adopt the same WHOIS data collection and display polices across the board, regardless of whether the WHOIS details for a given domain suggest that the registrant is a business or an individual.

But the GDPR only applies to data collected about people in Europe, so why should this impact WHOIS registration details collected on people who are outside of Europe?

Again, domain registrars are the ones collecting WHOIS data, and they are most unlikely to develop WHOIS record collection and dissemination policies that seek to differentiate between entities covered by GDPR and those that may not be. Such an attempt would be fraught with legal and monetary complications that they simply will not take on voluntarily.

What’s more, the domain registrar community tends to view the public display of WHOIS data as a nuisance and a cost center. They have mainly only allowed public access to WHOIS data because ICANN’s contracts state that they should. So, from registrar community’s point of view, the less information they must make available to the public, the better.

Like it or not, the job of tracking down and bringing cybercriminals to justice falls to law enforcement agencies — not security researchers. Law enforcement agencies will still have unfettered access to full WHOIS records.

As it relates to inter-state crimes (i.e, the bulk of all Internet abuse), law enforcement — at least in the United States — is divided into two main components: The investigative side (i.e., the FBI and Secret Service) and the prosecutorial side (the state and district attorneys who actually initiate court proceedings intended to bring an accused person to justice).

Much of the legwork done to provide the evidence needed to convince prosecutors that there is even a case worth prosecuting is performed by security researchers. The reasons why this is true are too numerous to delve into here, but the safe answer is that law enforcement investigators typically are more motivated to focus on crimes for which they can readily envision someone getting prosecuted — and because very often their plate is full with far more pressing, immediate and local (physical) crimes.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a blanket statement because in many cases local, state and federal law enforcement agencies will do this often tedious legwork of cybercrime investigations on their own — provided it involves or impacts someone in their jurisdiction. But due in large part to these jurisdictional issues, politics and the need to build prosecutions around a specific locality when it comes to cybercrime cases, very often law enforcement agencies tend to miss the forest for the trees.

Who cares if security researchers will lose access to WHOIS data, anyway? To borrow an assertion from the Internet Governance article, “maybe it’s high time for security researchers and businesses that harvest personal information from WHOIS on an industrial scale to refine and remodel their research methods and business models.”

This is an alluring argument. After all, the technology and security industries claim to be based on innovation. But consider carefully how anti-virus, anti-spam or firewall technologies currently work. The unfortunate reality is that these technologies are still mostly powered by humans, and those humans rely heavily on access to key details about domain reputation and ownership history.

Those metrics for reputation weigh a host of different qualities, but a huge component of that reputation score is determining whether a given domain or Internet address has been connected to any other previous scams, spams, attacks or other badness. We can argue about whether this is the best way to measure reputation, but it doesn’t change the prospect that many of these technologies will in all likelihood perform less effectively after WHOIS records start being heavily redacted.

Don’t advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning obviate the need for researchers to have access to WHOIS data?

This sounds like a nice idea, but again it is far removed from current practice. Ask anyone who regularly uses WHOIS data to determine reputation or to track and block malicious online threats and I’ll wager you will find the answer is that these analyses are still mostly based on manual lookups and often thankless legwork. Perhaps such trendy technological buzzwords will indeed describe the standard practice of the security industry at some point in the future, but in my experience this does not accurately depict the reality today.

Okay, but Internet addresses are pretty useful tools for determining reputation. The sharing of IP addresses tied to cybercriminal operations isn’t going to be impacted by the GDPR, is it? 

That depends on the organization doing the sharing. I’ve encountered at least two cases in the past few months wherein European-based security firms have been reluctant to share Internet address information at all in response to the GDPR — based on a perceived (if not overly legalistic) interpretation that somehow this information also might be considered personally identifying data. This reluctance to share such information out of a concern that doing so might land the sharer in legal hot water can indeed have a chilling effect on the important sharing of threat intelligence across borders.

According to the Internet Governance article, “If you need to get in touch with a website’s administrator, you will be able to do so in what is a less intrusive manner of achieving this purpose: by using an anonymized email address, or webform, to reach them (The exact implementation will depend on the registry). If this change is inadequate for your ‘private detective’ activities and you require full WHOIS records, including the personal information, then you will need to declare to a domain name registry your specific need for and use of this personal information. Nominet, for instance, has said that interested parties may request the full WHOIS record (including historical data) for a specific domain and get a response within one business day for no charge.”

I’m sure this will go over tremendously with both the hacked sites used to host phishing and/or malware download pages, as well as those phished by or served with malware in the added time it will take to relay and approve said requests.

According to a Q3 2017 study (PDF) by security firm Webroot, the average lifespan of a phishing site is between four and eight hours. How is waiting 24 hours before being able to determine who owns the offending domain going to be helpful to either the hacked site or its victims? It also doesn’t seem likely that many other registrars will volunteer for this 24-hour turnaround duty — and indeed no others have publicly demonstrated any willingness to take on this added cost and hassle.

I’ve heard that ICANN is pushing for a delay in the GDPR as it relates to WHOIS records, to give the registrar community time to come up with an accreditation system that would grant vetted researchers access to WHOIS records. Why isn’t that a good middle ground?

It might be if ICANN hadn’t dragged its heels in taking GDPR seriously until perhaps the past few months. As it stands, the experts I’ve interviewed see little prospect for such a system being ironed out or in gaining necessary traction among the registrar community to accomplish this anytime soon. And most experts I’ve interviewed predict it is likely that the Internet community will still be debating about how to create such an accreditation system a year from now.

Hence, it’s not likely that WHOIS records will continue to be anywhere near as useful to researchers in a month or so than they were previously. And this reality will continue for many months to come — if indeed some kind of vetted WHOIS access system is ever envisioned and put into place.

After I registered a domain name using my real email address, I noticed that address started receiving more spam emails. Won’t hiding email addresses in WHOIS records reduce the overall amount of spam I can expect when registering a domain under my real email address?

That depends on whether you believe any of the responses to the bolded questions above. Will that address be spammed by people who try to lure you into paying them to register variations on that domain, or to entice you into purchasing low-cost Web hosting services from some random or shady company? Probably. That’s exactly what happens to almost anyone who registers a domain name that is publicly indexed in WHOIS records.

The real question is whether redacting all email addresses from WHOIS will result in overall more bad stuff entering your inbox and littering the Web, thanks to reputation-based anti-spam and anti-abuse systems failing to work as well as they did before GDPR kicks in.

It’s worth noting that ICANN created a working group to study this exact issue, which noted that “the appearance of email addresses in response to WHOIS queries is indeed a contributor to the receipt of spam, albeit just one of many.” However, the report concluded that “the Committee members involved in the WHOIS study do not believe that the WHOIS service is the dominant source of spam.”

Do you have something against people not getting spammed, or against better privacy in general? 

To the contrary, I have worked the majority of my professional career to expose those who are doing the spamming and scamming. And I can say without hesitation that an overwhelming percentage of that research has been possible thanks to data included in public WHOIS registration records.

Is the current WHOIS system outdated, antiquated and in need of an update? Perhaps. But scrapping the current system without establishing anything in between while laboring under the largely untested belief that in doing so we will achieve some kind of privacy utopia seems myopic.

If opponents of the current WHOIS system are being intellectually honest, they will make the following argument and stick to it: By restricting access to information currently available in the WHOIS system, whatever losses or negative consequences on security we may suffer as a result will be worth the cost in terms of added privacy. That’s an argument I can respect, if not agree with.

But for the most part that’s not the refrain I’m hearing. Instead, what this camp seems to be saying is if you’re not on board with the WHOIS changes that will be brought about by the GDPR, then there must be something wrong with you, and in any case here a bunch of thinly-sourced reasons why the coming changes might not be that bad.