Major Flaw in Internet Addressing Discovered, Fixed
When you type a URL (say, switched.com) into a browser, a whole series of operations take place in the background to navigate your request through the maze of the Internet, ultimately getting it to the set of computers that host this site. That process of identifying servers by name is called the Domain Name System, or DNS, and it's fundamental to the entirety of the 'Net. A few months ago, however, security experts found a flaw in the core of DNS that could allow malicious users to make any site they want look like any other site, and we're only hearing about it now.
The flaw would basically allow anyone to redirect a URL to a private computer. They could take over the URL for your bank or e-mail account, put up a page that looked exactly like the real thing, then steal your username and password when you tried to log in. There'd be no way to know that it wasn't the real thing until it was too late. Scary? Yes, and that's exactly why experts from every major provider of software that provides DNS services have worked together in secret for months to implement the fix, which was finally released yesterday.
This doesn't mean that we're completely out of the water, as certain system administrators are occasionally a bit lax in updating their machines, but hopefully by the time you read this, the major sites will all have been updated, meaning you can go back to your idle and carefree surfing again. [Source: Yahoo! News]
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