Security Experts:

WRITE FOR US
Ram Mohan's picture

Ram Mohan

Contact Ram Mohan

Ram Mohan is the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services including domain name registry and DNS solutions. Ram also serves as the Security & Stability Advisory Committee's liaison to ICANN’s Board of Directors and has helped direct and write numerous policies effecting domain name registration and DNS security.

Recent articles by Ram Mohan

  • DNSSEC's Time Is Here, But SOPA Presents Challenges
    Adopters of DNSSEC in the U.S. have a unique barrier to adoption: Congress. SOPA and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act contain provisions that could break the functionality of DNSSEC.
  • Five Things you Should know About Domain Names
    Domain names are part of the plumbing of the Internet and you don't need to worry too much about how it works, until it doesn't. Here are five facts about domains names that you should know.
  • What Are Criminals Doing with Typos in Domain Names?
    Domain name typo squatting, a decade-old headache for marketing and legal departments, is putting corporate data at risk. But evidence suggests that it is becoming a risk that also needs to be on the CSO's radar.
  • Five DNS Threats You Should Protect Against
    Too often, DNS lends itself to being overlooked when it comes to security. Here are five common threats that leverage DNS, along with suggested best-practice, risk-mitigation strategies.
  • Security Concerns Over New Domains are Full of FUD
    The new gTLD program will enable an unprecedented level of competition, and potential innovation, in the domain name market. But will this expansion cause security “mayhem” on the Internet, as some onlookers have predicted?
  • Don't Blame the Domain: Where Internet Bad Boys Aren't Hiding
    The Internet is a great tool for helping people become anonymous. Security professionals and law enforcement agents have always been painfully aware of this problem, which is why so few malware creators, phishers and malicious hackers are ever brought to justice.
  • The Veterans of the Future will be Those in Computer-Based Combat
    Soldiers more comfortable studying code on a laptop screen than staring down the sights of a rifle will play a key role in future battles. The weapons stockpiles of the future will include stashes of zero-day vulnerabilities, botnets, control codes and sophisticated malware.
  • Will New Domain Extensions Help Secure the Internet?
    The ability of any company to apply for a new “dot.anything” gTLD is expected to bring increased consumer choice and technological innovation to the Internet's addressing systems. But will it also spur the adoption of enhanced Internet security? There are good reasons to believe it may, particularly within the addressing system itself.
  • How Logging On From Starbucks Can Compromise Your Corporate Security
    Do you allow your employees to surf using open wireless networks from their phones or laptops? What are the easiest ways that attackers can sniff email or gain access to corporate information from these devices? What are the best ways to protect corporation information on the go?
  • Storms in the Cloud: Lessons from the Amazon Cloud Outage
    The Amazon Web Services Cloud Outage showed the world that the cloud — while great — does not absolve companies from taking fundamental precautions to safeguard their systems online.
  • No IPocalypse, but the IPv6 Transition Still Presents Risks
    Because there are no industry standards for what constitutes "IPv6 support," security-conscious buyers need to draft their own requirements, based on what they currently expect from IPv4 equipment. Attackers may use this window of transition to increase their malicious use of IPv6 addresses.
  • Spear Phishing: Beyond the Common Sense Defense
    Cybercriminals have enough information to construct highly targeted phishing attacks. So, how can you mitigate the risk of falling victim to spear-phishing attacks?
  • Two Years After the Conficker Worm, Are We Still At Risk?
    We still don't know who created Conficker or what that person’s motivations were. What we do know: Conficker could have proved much more damaging than it ultimately did, but the threat has not entirely disappeared.
  • DNS Migration: How To Minimize Problems When Switching DNS Providers
    How you can minimize some of the dangers when migrating DNS providers, and come out on the other side with no downtime and no disruption to your business.
  • Attacking the Internet's Core
    The Internet is heavily resilient to damage. Due to its decentralized topology, the loss of individual networks, even core pieces of infrastructure, should not bring down the Internet as a whole. But what if there were a way to "kill" the Internet, even temporarily?
  • Are Your Domains Safe? Five Ways to Safeguard Your Domain Name and Website
    Domain names are one of the critical components of any Internet presence. They can cost as little as $10 per year to register, but can have hundreds of millions of dollars riding upon their availability.
  • Does the Rise of the Tablet Predict the Demise of your Security?
    Tablets are set to become the must-have mobile business productivity tool for information workers within many enterprises. And like any new technology that enters the enterprise, the tablet will bring with it its own set of security challenges.
  • Is IPv6 Part of your Risk Management Framework?
    The Internet's supply of IPv4 addresses is quickly becoming empty, setting the clock ticking on the final exhaustion of the Internet numbering plan that the world has used for over three decades. CIOs who have not planned IPv6 transition plans as part of their strategic agenda must act now, or risk the entire enterprise online.
  • The Security Highs and Lows of 2010
    This year may not be remembered for any single stand-out security incident, but 2010 still had many important lessons to teach.
  • Don't Let The Grinch Steal Your Traffic!
    How To Keep Your Website Secure This Holiday Season - While struggling through the busy season can still be challenging, using the strategies listed above might help your organization sail through to the New Year without a major crisis.
  • Routing on The Internet: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?
    For a number of years, many of the Internet's leading architects have considered the rapid growth and fragmentation of core routing tables one of the most significant threats to the long-term stability and scalability of the Internet. As the number of Internet hosts and networks increases, the greater the challenge will be for networks running older or slower equipment.
  • Three Steps to Safer Passwords
    Are your passwords safe? Three simple ways to create memorable yet secure passwords
  • The Rise of the Small Botnet
    Botnets controlled by criminal enterprises all over the world continue to multiply at a steep rate, and it is now arguably the smaller, harder-to-trace operations that organizations should be the most worried about.
  • Internet Security Threats from a Multilingual Domain Name System
    Internationalized domain names (IDNs) will enable hundreds of millions of surfers navigate the Internet entirely in their native languages. With the number of characters allowable in domain names increasing from 37 into potentially the thousands, the possibility of two strings being visually confusing increases considerably.
  • What Every CIO Should Do About DNS Security
    The security of an organization's critical DNS is still often overlooked, despite the obvious fact that it is arguably one of the most vital pieces of infrastructure, the piece that ties all the other pieces together.

Delivered Twice Each Week, the SecurityWeek Briefing Won't Flood Your InBox, But Will Keep you Well Informed on What's Happening in the Industry, Along with Insightful Columns from Industry Experts.

Privacy: We never sell or share your personal information or email address with any other company and you can unsubscribe instantly at any time.