Flush your DNS cache (again)

This time it appears that DNS for major websites, including the NY Times, has been compromised. Attackers put in DNS entries that redirected visitors to a malware site. The compromise has been fixed and the fake DNS entries corrected.
However, people may still have the old data in their DNS caches and security experts are suggesting everyone flush their DNS cache to make sure the fake data is gone.
The Washington Post has an article explaining DNS hijacking.

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Address leak leads to phishing

A number of people in the industry are reporting getting phishing emails to addresses they used at DocuSign.
There were initial reports of a DocuSign data breach back in December. Now it appears DocuSign is being used as a phishing target.

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More on the attack against Spamhaus and how you can help

While much of the attack against Spamhaus has been mitigated and their services and websites are currently up, the attack is still ongoing.  This is the biggest denial of service attack in history, with as much as 300 gigabits per second hitting Spamhaus servers and their upstream links.
This traffic is so massive, that it’s actually affecting the Internet and web surfers in some parts of the world are seeing network slowdown because of this.
While I know that some of you may be cheering at the idea that Spamhaus is “paying” for their actions, this does not put you on the side of the good. Spamhaus’ actions are legal. The actions of the attackers are clearly illegal. Not only is the attack itself illegal, but many of the sites hosted by the purported source of the attacks provide criminal services.
By cheering for and supporting the attackers, you are supporting criminals.
Anyone who thinks that an appropriate response to a Spamhaus listing is an attack on the very structure of the Internet is one of the bad guys.
You can help, though. This attack is due to open DNS resolvers which are reflecting and amplifying traffic from the attackers. Talk to your IT group. Make sure your resolvers aren’t open and if they are, get them closed. The Open Resolver Project published its list of open resolvers in an effort to shut them down.
Here are some resources for the technical folks.
Open Resolver Project
Closing your resolver by Team Cymru
BCP 38 from the IETF
Ratelimiting DNS
News Articles (some linked above, some coming out after I posted this)
NY Times
BBC News
Cloudflare update
Spamhaus dDOS grows to Internet Threatening Size
Cyber-attack on Spamhaus slows down the internet
Cyberattack on anti-spam group Spamhaus has ripple effects
Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Hits Internet
Spamhaus accuses Cyberbunker of massive cyberattack

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Internet Storm Center on the Spamhaus DOS

The Internet Storm Center (ISC) has a blog post up discussing the DOS attack against Spamhaus. They do confirm they saw traffic approaching 300Gbps against Spamhaus. They also point out that most people probably never knew.

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