Today is the second and last day of Infiltrate 2013 which is taking place in Miami Beach. It's my first time at Infiltrate and so far I've been really impressed with the quality of the conference.

The opening keynote by Chris Eagle definitely set the tone for the rest of the con, with a very clear focus on offense. Chris shared his own view on various issues concerning how the US Armed Forces - and the Navy in particular - deal with educating people on cyber.

One of the bits I found particularly interesting was the Title 10 issue. Many of the experts creating cyber-tools, which would make them best equipped to handle them, are civilians. However under Title 10, only military personnel can actually 'pull the trigger'. You can see how this can be problematic.

"If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why." Well, "a bit more sluggish" for limited sets of communications in parts of Europe for a few days is not a broken internet, and is certainly not close to a critical infrastructure disaster.

There's been a lot of attention for the recent reports regarding a DDoS attack against Spamhaus which reached a peak of 300gbps. Yes, such enormous amount of throughput definitely makes this one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever seen. DDoS attacks have seen an increase in popularity in recent times and there's no sign they'll go away anytime soon. Cyber-criminals, competitors, hacktivists and nation-state sponsored actors all have their motives to use DDoS attacks. In this case, a suspected entity behind these attacks is a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker, whose owner denies being responsible, but claims to be a spokesman for the attackers. The conflict between Spamhaus and CyberBunker goes back to 2011 and has now escalated after Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker earlier this month. The timing and conflict is uncanny. And, Spamhaus is certainly under attack from some determined group capable of generating massive amounts of traffic, forcing them to move to hosting and service provider CloudFlare, known for effectively dissipating large DDoS attacks.

Like many others, I took advantage of Amazon.com's sale and ordered a Kindle Fire HD last week. When I got around to exploring the Amazon App Store, it didn't take long before running into malware.

While searching for a particular benchmarking app I was presented with some additional apps. One of them immediately looked suspicious.

Yesterday the Iranian CERT made an announcement about a new piece of wiper-like malware. We detect these files as Trojan.Win32.Maya.a.

This is an extremely simplistic attack. In essence, the attacker wrote some BAT files and then used a BAT2EXE tool to turn them into Windows PE files. The author seems to have used (a variant of) this particular BAT2EXE tool.

There's no connection to any of the previous wiper-like attacks we've seen. We also don't have any reports of this malware from the wild.

BlackHat USA may have been wrapped up for the year but DEFCON is in full swing. I didn't stay around for DEFCON though, which means I finally have some time to reflect on BlackHat.

This year featured the first time Apple presented at BlackHat, about iOS security. While the presentation lacked the details usually seen in BH talks it definitely showed Apple is trying to open up. Being (more) communicative is vital to doing security response right.

This is of particular importance for Apple as there were quite a few talks focusing on Apple's security. Ranging from attacks on iOS to Mac-oriented EFI rootkits.

At the recent SOURCE Boston conference, one presentation that caught my attention was called SexyDefense - Maximizing the home-field advantage.

This was quite a thought-provoking presentation that was based on the old concept that offense is always the best defense.

Today is the last day of CanSecWest - a security conference taking place in Vancouver, Canada. On Wednesday I filled in for Costin Raiu and talked about our forensics work into Duqu's C&C servers.

As I'm writing this, Google Chrome just got popped. Again. The general feeling is that $60k, even with a sandbox escape, isn't a whole lot of money for a Chrome zero-day. So, to see multiple zero-days against Chrome is quite the surprise, especially when considering the browser's Pwn2Own track record.

Separately, I found the Q&A session following Facebook's Alex Rice’s presentation immensely intriguing.

Dutch Certificate Authority KPN/Getronics has announced the suspension of the issuance of digital certificates.

The reason for this is that a breach has been discovered on a KPN web server related to PKI. The attack dates back no less than four years.

KPN, best known for its telecom business, acquired Getronics four years ago. Former Getronics has a certificate authority similar to Diginotar. Like Diginotar, KPN is allowed to issue 'special' certificates for the Dutch government and public services. In fact, many organizations affected by the Diginotar incident switched to KPN certificates.

In an almost unprecedented event the Dutch minister of internal affairs gave a press conference at 1:15 AM Friday to Saturday night. He announced the Dutch government was revoking trust in Diginotar.

Diginotar basically consisted of two seperates branches. One branch was a certificate authority which dealt with regular businesses. The other branch was focused on government and called "PKIoverheid". The audit conducted on Diginotar's systems showed the integrity of the PKIoverheid authority couldn't be guaranteed. It should be presumed the integrity is broken.

At the beginning of last week the Dutch government had vouched for the integrity of the PKIoverheid CA. This caused the browser makers to only blacklist the non-goverment CA from Diginotar. Next time around browser makers won't be quite as trusting.

The attack on Diginotar doesn't rival Stuxnet in terms of sophistication or coordination. However, the consequences of the attack on Diginotar will far outweigh those of Stuxnet. The attack on Diginotar will put cyberwar on or near the top of the political agenda of Western governments.

Here's a break down of most of the important takeaways from this incident:

Earlier this week DigiNotar said another audit would be performed and the results of this audit would be made public.

One of the big questions is whether the government CA branch - called DigiNotar PKIoverheid - has also been compromised.

In seeming preparation of these results, the Dutch government has sent out an email to users who've been issued a certificate via the DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA. All these companies/services are tied to the government or public services. Pending the results of this audit the Dutch government is asking PKIoverheid certificate owners to do the following:

- List the PKIoverheid certificates in the organisation.

- List the processes for which these certificates are being used.

- List the consequences in case the PKIoverheid certificates can no longer be trusted.

I think it would be wise at this point for the affected browser makers to start preparing an update which will also blacklist DigiNotar's PKIoverheid CA. Pending the outcome of the audit, of course.

A lot of Dutch government sites and services are going to be affected by the revocation. Clean up is going to be painful.

The Dutch government has used DigiNotar as an intermediary CA in quite a lot of cases. The Dutch government actually has a root CA of their own. It could be leveraged to quickly produce new certificates for affected services.

I hope it's truly clear now that the Dutch government needs to distance itself from DigiNotar.

Previous blog entries on this matter: More on DigiNotar and The bigger issue with the rogue Google SSL cert