Welcome!

Web 2.0 Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Elizabeth White, Roger Strukhoff, Kevin Benedict, David Weinberger

Related Topics: Web 2.0

Web 2.0: Article

Internet Security - DNS Flaw: "Every Network is at Risk," Says Dan Kaminsky

Kaminsky: 75% of Fortune 500 companies have already fixed the problem, 15% have done nothing

"We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them," Ken Silva, chief technology officer at Verisign, told a reporter as Dan Kaminsky (pictured), the man who discovered a loophole in the DNS system that allows web users to be redirected to fake sites even when they have typed in the correct URL, spoke out yesterday publicly for the first time about his discovery at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Kaminsky has spent the better part of a decade analyzing computer security issues with the Fortune 500. Formerly of Cisco and Avaya, he is presently the Director of Penetration Testing for IOActive, Inc., where he consults for a wide range of companies, including Microsoft. He is a well known public speaker, with his “Black Ops of TCP/IP” presentations being well attended at many conferences.


Try out Kaminskys' checker on your own site:

"Recently, a significant threat to DNS, the system that translates names you can remember (such as www.doxpara.com) to numbers the Internet can route (66.240.226.139) was discovered, that would allow malicious people to impersonate almost any website on the Internet. Software companies across the industry have quietly collaborated to simultaneously release fixes for all affected name servers. To find out if the DNS server you use is vulnerable, click below."

More Stories By Web 2.0 News Desk

The Web 2.0 Journal News Desk keeps you up to speed with all that's happening in the world of the read/write Web and all its mushrooming new facets - from tagging, wikis, mash-ups, and image-sharing to "Advertising 2.0," podcasting, and The Writeable Web.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.