Internet Red Alert !

Dan Kaminsky, an American internet security specialist has discovered a major flaw in the internet “security mechanism” a flaw that could lead to millions of people being targeted by on-line criminals.

The bug - described as “cache poisoning” exploits the internet’s address mechanism the Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS maps the names of the websites and it associates them with numerical addresses of their internet servers; when we visit a site most of us just type in some words , for example: www.google.com and not numbers and we do this with the help of the DNS; the “bug” allows the hackers to intercept this process and to map it to a different process than the one intended. This would allow criminals to redirect the web users to phishing websites even if they had entered the correct address.

Since this “bug” have been discovered Dan Kaminsky has been working with major technology companies such as Microsoft and Cisco to release software patches and security updates before hackers discover how to exploit this flaw: “This is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the internet. The severity of this bug is shown by the number of those who are on board with the patches. If a bad guy had found this before Dan did, it would have been very bad,” said Rich Mogull, a researcher at Securosis.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

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