New Internet Poison Gets Instant Antidote

Vendors are patching up a domain name server (DNS) vulnerability disclosed to the public yesterday, blocking a flaw that could be exploited to hijack certain Internet domains. The underlying security problem, known as DNS (domain name server) cache poisoning, is something that's been around for some time. What's new is that researchers have uncovered a more effective way to do it, although they kept that discovery under wraps until a patch was ready for distribution. "Everybody was used to 10-foot floods of these attack packets, so they built 20-foot dikes. Now, we found a way to get a 100-foot flood, so we've made 200-foot dikes," says Paul Mockapetris, chief... [read full story]