Fortify Your Internet Security Settings Now

July 25, 2008 – 5:24 PM

The Web became a substantially more dangerous place this week, thanks largely to the publication of instructions that show cyber criminals how to exploit a pervasive, critical flaw in the Internet infrastructure.

While Internet service providers and corporations can mitigate the danger by updating the software that powers vulnerable components of their networks, data released yesterday indicates that only about half of the world’s online population is currently protected by these updates.

At issue is a basic design flaw in the domain name system. DNS is the communications standard that acts as a kind of telephone book for the Internet, translating human-friendly Web site names like example.com into numeric addresses that are easier for networking equipment to handle and route.

When people type a Web site name into their Internet browser, the process of routing of that name to Internet address is generally handled through DNS servers managed by Internet service providers and corporations.

But according to research released this month, most of those DNS servers are vulnerable to a security flaw that allows miscreants to silently alter the virtual road maps that those systems rely on to route traffic. As a result, a cyber criminal could trivially rewrite those records so that when customers of a vulnerable ISP or network provider try to visit a particular Web site, they are instead taken to a counterfeit site created by the bad guys.

Source:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/the_web_just_became_a_much_mor.html