SAN FRANCISCO - March 17, 2011 - DNS abuse remains among greatest Internet security vulnerabilities exploited for cybercrime, child pornography, identity theft, spam and phishing, according to a blue ribbon panel at the ICANN meeting this week in San Francisco. The panel, including representatives of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, the FBI, DEA, and Interpol suggested that the inherent insecurities in the Internet's DNS infrastructure, the system computers use to find other the Internet addresses for any web site, remains easily and commonly exploited.
The DNS Abuse panel at ICANN's event focused largely on criminals' activities and the lack of sufficient industry-wide cooperation. Interpol's Michael Moran, whose department investigates criminal child abuse material, especially sex crimes against children and pornography, described recent child abuse cases, often perpetrated by sophisticated organized crime organizations that exploit the lack of DNS security which he called "the big whole" in Internet crime prevention. Moran lamented the slow pace of industry cooperation, as well as the lack of progress between law enforcement and ICANN. "Let's clear away the chairs and start dancing," Moran encouraged.
Nearly all Internet traffic relies on DNS. An unencrypted DNS service can be attacked by hackers to return false results, directing users to fake sites that the hackers control and that can be used to exploit users. Vulnerable DNS services are currently used by millions of people and exploited by the types of criminals pursued by the FBI, DEA, Interpol and all the ICANN panel participants.
Private industry is responding: Mailshell, the leading provider of Internet security engines for OEMs, filters dangerous DNS traffic via its Mailshell DNS SDK, the first DNS filtering service with military-grade encryption. The DNS SDK leverages data collected via Mailshell's LiveFeed reputation service, and uses secure AES 256-bit encryption that would, according to Verisign, require trillions of years to crack. Thousands of companies and millions of consumers worldwide currently rely on 'Powered by Mailshell' engines for Internet security.
Mailshell collects LiveFeed data from around the world via its network of OEM partners, statistics gathered from its SDKs, data sharing partnerships and LiveReport, Mailshell's collaborative network of end-users. Mailshell gathers, aggregates, and synthesizes hundreds of millions of data points per day to provide a comprehensive view of new attack vectors, security threats and changing online reputations. The resulting LiveFeed data is available via near real-time queries by Mailshell's OEM partners, either as a stand-alone service or from within one of Mailshell's SDKs.
"DNS security lags far behind other types of Internet filtering and adoption of new standards remains slow," said Tonny Yu, CEO of Mailshell. "We believe private industry has an opportunity and responsibility to create technology innovations that help law enforcements' efforts."
The Mailshell DNS SDK is available for OEM licensing. Mailshell's DNS SDK combines a small software library with the power of LiveFeed, Mailshell's fast, reliable, and secure cloud-based data service. LiveFeed includes 61 secured data centers in 24 countries on six continents, to ensure minimum latency and guaranteed 100 percent uptime. Mailshell has more than 11 years of experience in cloud computing-based security and LiveFeed handles more than 10 billion queries per month.
About Mailshell: Mailshell (www.mailshell.com) is the leading provider of Internet security engines for OEMs, including Internet traffic reputation, anti-spam, anti-phishing, URL filtering and DNS security. Mailshell's software helps its global network OEM partners, including McAfee, CA, Check Point, ESET, AVG, Avast, NETGEAR and others, generate new revenue, up-sell existing products to new customers and minimize related engineering and support costs. Follow Mailshell on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mailshell.
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