The FBI, acting in concert with law enforcement authorities in other countries (primarily New Zealand), took down the popular website Megauploads by seizing its servers and other assets, shutting down its domains and arresting the people who run the site. It was a well-planned, coordinated attack that missed a few people, but got most of the principals.

As of midnight, Jan. 12, 2012, you can register for a vanity top level domain (TLD). In other words, this blog entry could appear on www.techsecuritytoday.techsecure or you might be able to look for burgers at www.mickyd. ICANN has thrown open the doors for anyone to choose whatever top level domain they want.

Government IT managers, government contractors or those who work for companies implementing DNSSEC know that configuration can be a nightmare, and that’s on a good day. Even DNS expert Casey Deccio, a computer scientist at Sandia National Labs, was having diffidulty troubleshooting problems with DNSSEC. So he decided something needed to be done.

Gathering intelligence is a lot like creating a mosaic: The best intelligence is developed by accumulating large numbers of small pieces of information. Eventually, the entity gathering the information gets a complete picture. That's why the latest hack attack by the Chinese government -- this time on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- is both fascinating and disturbing.

The news about Carrier IQ that’s been all over the Internet of late misses one critical factor: Logging everything that happens on a person's smartphone probably violates a variety of federal privacy and data protection regulations. If your Android phone is collecting the protected information that you send in e-mails, text messages or by other means, you could land in prison.