×

Warning

JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 78

Published in News

Internet was broken

by on09 July 2008

Image

Heavy weights fixed flaw in secret


A flaw in the coding of the World Wide Web has been fixed in secret by a collection of industry heavyweights.

If the DNS flaw had been exploited it could have turned the entire Internet over to phishers, but surprisingly no one found out about it. The problem was based on a fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the internet works. If exploited hackers could have easily lead people to fake sites, could rout them to wherever they liked whatever they typed into their browser.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and asked Microsoft, Sun and Cisco to solve it. He met with 16 researchers at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, to figure out what to do about the flaw.

The idea was to create a patch to release simultaneously across all computer software platforms. This had not been tried before, however everyone came to the party, Kaminsky told AFP.
Last modified on 09 July 2008
Rate this item
(0 votes)