Wow, this is simply unheard of. Yesterday it was publicly revealed that a major design flaw in the DNS protocol was simultaneously patched by vendors across the entire spectrum of the computer and technology world. The fact that they were able to keep this a secret for six months while they worked to plug the hole is simply amazing. The idea being of course to let the good guys fix the problem before the bad guys could take advantage of a critical function that runs the Internet. Details of how the exploit works is still forthcoming, but not until after everyone has patched. From what I understand this flaw will allow an attacker to poison the DNS cache which could potentially wreck havoc all over the Internets, causing unwitting users to think they are logging into a certain website only to actually be going somewhere else malicious for example.
DNS, or Domain Name System is what runs the internet. It is the main service that keeps track of the names to numbers so it is easy for you and me to go find a particular web site. In reality, all sites are just a bunch of IP addresses. Instead of having to remember 69.147.76.15 as a web site, we know to go to Yahoo.com, go ahead and paste that number in the address bar of your browser. Wow, magic! Through the hard work of DNS, this is how we keep our web addresses straight, simply speaking.
This flaw affects software and hardware vendors from a wide spectrum, including Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Linux, Windows, Apple and a whole host of others out there. Needless to say, its time to start patching your machines pronto! Windows users should perform a Windows Update now, the patch is out there.
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