A newly discovered flaw in the Internet’s core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force citizens to visit Web sites they didn’t want to, it plus allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

Considering the silent nature of the attack and the sensitive nature of a lot of electronic correspondence, the potential for damage from that second safety measure flaw is high. But there’s no evidence yet that that method of targeting

e-mail has been used in a successful attack.

Dan Kaminsky of Seattle-based protection consultant IOActive Inc. exposed a giant vulnerability in the Internet’s design that, in one case, allowed hackers to reroute some computer users in Texas to a fake Google.com site loaded with automated advertisement-clicking programs, a scam to generate profits for the hackers from those clicks.

The flaw wasn’t in the site itself, it was in the back-end machines responsible […]

Orginal post by dhiram