The biggest Internet security hole you never heard of…
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Security, Internet on
Over six months ago a penetration tester for a security outfit almost literally stumbled upon a fundamental security issue with the Internet, or to be more precise with the Domain Name System (DNS) that we all rely upon for the damn thing to work properly, that researcher Dan Kaminsky describes it as being such a big problem because the system is doing what it is meant to, what it was designed to, and so the vulnerability will simply be repeated by every vendor involved in the DNS business.
So serious was this design flaw, that Kaminsky says it could give any attacker who exploits it the power to replace any web site with a malicious one, and nobody would be any the wiser.
Which is why he did the decent thing and did not go mouthing off on some ’security blog’ about it before it had been fixed. Instead he went straight to the big boys in the business, Microsoft, Cisco, Juniper etc and asked for them to work together to fix the problem.
I can only say that I am pleased to report they did just that. And this week a number of hardware vendors have simultaneously released patches to seal the DNS security deal. Microsoft, for example, included the fix in its scheduled Patch Tuesday updates.
It is expected that all major ISPs will have applied the necessary ointment to the DNS within 30 days. Which is probably why neither Kaminsky nor the vendors have gone into technical specifics.
If you are truly curious, then the most information currently available can be found at CERT who issued a National Technical Cyber Security Alert on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Dan the man of the moment Kaminsky has made a browser based DNS exploit checking tool available on his website for any who wants to see if they are still vulnerable or not.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - July 10, 2008 on 12:21 am
The patch for Windows causes problems for security software like ZoneAlarm, not unexpectedly; I suppose it’s also to be expected that users are criticising Microsoft for the interaction rather than either understanding that it’s a security issue or, if appropriate, criticising the other software vendor…
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