http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/mag ... f_kaminsky

 

 

 

Then last January, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon, he flopped down on his bed, flipped open his laptop, and started playing games with DNS. He used a software program called Scapy to fire random queries at the system. He liked to see how it would respond and decided to ask for the location of a series of nonexistent Web pages at a Fortune 500 company. Then he tried to trick his DNS server in San Diego into thinking that he knew the location of the bogus pages.

 

 

 

Suddenly it worked. The server accepted one of the fake pages as real. But so what? He could now supply fake information for a page nobody would ever visit. Then he realized that the server was willing to accept more information from him. Since he had supplied data about one of the company's Web pages, it believed that he was an authoritative source for general information about the company's domain. The server didn't know that the Web page didn't existit was listening to Kaminsky now, as if it had been hypnotized.

 

 

 

Two paragraphs quoted out of a 5 page article.

 

 

 

What's everyone's thoughts on this, or is it completely blown out of proportion of the severity of this? To be honest if it's as it sounds it's pretty messed up and freaky that something so easy got past so many people (or it hasn't and has been a well kept secret).

 

 

 

But yea, it's pretty interesting how software/hardware still has it's open holes.

It's real, just told in a nice way. The DNS poisoning attacks are very, very real, and many people had become susceptible to it. Now, unless you haven't updated your machine since the dawn of time, you're protected from it.

I have a windows95 laptop (somewhere).

 

 

 

Is it susceptible to this?

Even better, could we just get a table (or link to one) that shows info on what is vulnerable and what isn't? I don't like the thought of my web requests being hijacked by anyone. :(

 

 

 

~D. V. "Hey... Where'd the page go?" Devnull

I have a windows95 laptop (somewhere).

 

 

 

Is it susceptible to this?

 

If you use your laptop as a DNS server, yes.

Even better, could we just get a table (or link to one) that shows info on what is vulnerable and what isn't? I don't like the thought of my web requests being hijacked by anyone. :(

 

 

 

~D. V. "Hey... Where'd the page go?" Devnull

 

As far as I know, if you've upgraded your machine since this past September at the latest, then you should be alright. More or less, this was affecting specific DNS servers, and they should've patched those things up by now.

Yep, the major things like banks, credit card sites, email sites, and the servers they run from have all been updated, it's just the non-important, unappealing sites/hosts that haven't patched themselves.