Tag: DNS

Share To get a look at the world of cyber-security from an insider, Switched turned to noted and notorious hacker Jeff Moss, a.k.a Dark Tangent. Moss got his start hacking the phone system before founding DefCon, the long-running annual hacker convention in Las Vegas, in 1992. He then took his l337 skillz to big industry by founding the network security consultancy firm Black Hat. Moss's ...

The domain name system, or DNS, is an essential part of keeping the Internet running. Without it, URLs can't be translated to IP addresses, and browsers become useless. But DNS has a serious flaw: a lack of basic security features. It's because of this that hackers are able to easily perpetrate attacks, like the one the Iranian Cyber Army recently launched against Twitter. To address this ...

Monday night, all of Sweden lost access to the Internet, thanks to a problem that arose during routine maintenance of the country's top-level domain, .se (like .com or .us in the U.S.). The root of the issue was an improperly configured script (or set of commands) used to update the .se zone. When Sweden's Internet Infrastructure Foundation investigated the cause, it found that the error in the ...

Remember that massive Internet addressing flaw that broke late last summer? The one that has the potential to let any malicious hacker out there intercept traffic to any site and, more dangerously, pose as any official site? Well, it's been patched by most, but some are a little slow on the draw, and an attendee to the Black Hat security conference has indicated he is releasing a tool that should ...

Remember that ugly flaw in Internet addressing, or DNS, which was detected and fixed, but not by everyone and not in time? The man behind many of those warnings, security expert Dean Kaminsky, recently gave a presentation at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, elaborating on how the flaw not only affects Web pages, which has been most commonly reported on, but also could allow hackers to take ...

Remember that major DNS flaw we reported about a few weeks back? The one that was patched before it was announced but attacks were feared anyway because some folks are slow to update (or patch) their systems? Well, not one but two separate means for exploiting the flaw have been discovered, and one has already been added to an incredibly popular suite of hacking tools, leading one security ...

Remember that major flaw announced earlier this month in DNS, the Domain Name System responsible for getting your browser from a URL like www.switched.com to the actual computer that hosts it? Well, fixes were released for the problem before the details of the issue were widely known, and the hope had been to keep those details under wraps for another month or so to give time for Internet ...

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, ...

Zlob, one of the most common pieces of malicious software (according to Microsoft), has undergone a frightening transformation. After infecting a victim's PC, Zlob checks to see if the computer is connected to a wireless router (the device that helps create the Wi-Fi hotspot in your house). If connected, then Zlob attempts to gain access by using a list of common and default username and password ...