Open Resolver Project Founder Jared Mauch Receives M3AAWG J.D. Falk Award for Identifying Systems at Risk

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Oct 21, 2014) - M³AAWG General Meeting -- The founder of a far-reaching, volunteer program to identify millions of servers on the Internet with open DNS settings that could be commandeered in DDoS and spoofing attacks was honored with the 2014 J.D. Falk Award at the M³AAWG 32^nd General Meeting today in Boston. Jared Mauch received the award from the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group for three related projects that help prevent vulnerable servers from being used in cyber assaults: The Open Resolver Project, the Open NTP Project and the Open SNMP Project. 

With the frequency and intensity of DDoS attacks escalating, pinpointing the enormous number of Internet-facing servers with open DNS and other network settings that can be unknowingly deployed in these outbreaks is an important but massive undertaking. The programs developed by Mauch collect current Internet data to identify exposed machines and provide this information to the trusted security community for remediation.

"Sharing this information with the industry and community has plugged a huge hole in Internet security and it has contributed to the overall decline in open DNS traffic. Jared invested his personal time and energy to get this work off the ground and he continues to run the projects every day without fanfare. This is the type of selfless dedication to protecting end-users that the J.D. Falk Award was created to recognize and encourage," M³AAWG Chairman of the Board Chris Roosenraad said.

A network engineer at NTT Communications Global IP Network, a business unit of NTT America, Mauch started the Open Resolver Project in early 2013 to provide both his employer and the security community at large with vital data identifying servers at risk. As he outlined in a video describing the projects and recent results, Mauch performs weekly scans, gathers information on exposed hosts, then shares it with Computer Emergency Response Teams, ISPs and network equipment vendors. CERTS, network operators and hardware vendors use his data stream to alert their customers to issues and reduce the number of susceptible servers online. The data is also critically important to other security researchers in their efforts to track ongoing attacks.