A major flaw in the Net infrastructure was leaked to the public Monday before many IT directors had the chance to apply safety measure patches. The flaw was discovered weeks ago by Dan Kaminsky, a shield expert at IOActive, who has worked with industry leading software developers investigating World Wide Web vulnerabilities.

The potential breech is in the current implementation of the Domain Name System for Web servers. DNS is essentially a lookup system for Web servers: names of domains, such

as newsfactor.com, are translated by DNS servers to static IP addresses, essentially the true location of the site.

Cause and Cure

A flaw in the DNS caching of incoming requests makes it susceptible to malicious misdirection of Web traffic. whether a DNS server does not have an IP address for a requested domain, it asks for that info from another DNS server.

whether the clueless DNS server’s cache is fooled by […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News