Broadband Developments

The old saying if it bleeds it leads but this is getting out of hand. The DNS story is a real one, but lets move on to solutions - it’s clear that this as news is “beating this dead horse”. Enough of the gloom and doom. There is no doubt Dan Kaminsky is lovin the visability, but enough already on the problem. Time to move on to solutions.

Everyone knows DNS has a tons of holes but there are fixes and commercial software like Infoblox (now a sponsor of this blog - Thanks Infoblox).

Here is the timeline of this global conversation on BroadDev on the DNS story (with links externally to other credible sources): All of our contributors have chimed in on this topic.. very relevant.

July 22, 2008 - DNS Vunerability Has Now Gone Wild

July 23, 2008 - DNS Gone Wild - Exclusive Interview with Cricket Lui

July 24, 2008 - ZDNet Reports that DNS Exploit Code Has Been Published

July 24, 2008 - Cert: 60% of Recursive Name Servers UnPatched

July 25, 2008 - DNS Exploit is a Sleeping Zombie - Get the Patch

July 25, 2008 - Is Change Control Making the DNS Worse?

July 29, 2008 - DNS Exploit Again - It Keeps Going and Going - Feels like the Energizer Bunny of Exploits

July 29, 2008 - Breaking News: Now Patch Your Firewalls Because the DSN Patch Won’t Work With Leading Firewalls

July 30, 2008 - DNS SUCKS - Ok I Said It - Now What - Talk to Trusted Sources Until PAT mode is Fixed

July 31, 2008 - DNS Flaw Could Disrupt Unified Communications

July 31, 2008 - Kaminsky’s DNS Exploit Exposes Internet Core Challenge

August 5, 2008 - Black Hat 2008 - Look for Social Nets and DNS to Be Hot Topics

August 7, 2008 - Leaked Memo: DNS Security Flaw - Worst Security Hole Since 1997

These links are just the BroadDev coverage - This thing went supernova when John Markoff put it front and center in the NYTimes.

Time for solutions please - this as news is a dead horse.

Robert Vamosi of Cnet has a good round up of the upcoming Black Hat 2008.

Look for social networking and multivendor DNS problems to be a big part of the conversation.  Just this month we’ve seen the DNS monster rise up.  Also what isn’t as visable are the little exploits in the social media or social network fabric.  Things like twitter spoofing, twitter attacks, and a entirely new definition of “Fake Friends”.

This week it’s Twitter’s turn to host an attack - one that is targeting both Twitter users and the Internet community at large. In this case it’s a malicious Twitter profile twitter.com/[skip]/ with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’ which has a photo advertising a video with girls posted.

This profile has obviously been created especially for infecting users, as there is no other data except the photo, which contains the link to the video.

If you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file labeled Adobe Flash (it’s a fake) on your machine; a technique that is currently very popular.

In reality, this is a Trojan downloader that proceeds to download 10 banker Trojans onto the infected machine, all of which are disguised as MP3 files. We first detected the downloader proactively as Heur.Downloader and then added a signature to detect it also as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Banload.sco.

On other related blogging Adobe is seeing bad activity around their platform. From the Adobe web site “We have seen coverage from the security community of a worm on popular social networking sites that is using social engineering lures to get users to install a piece of malware. According to the reports, the worm posts comments on these sites that include links to a fake site. If the link is followed, users are told they need to update their Flash Player. The installer, posted on a malicious site, of course installs malware instead of Flash Player.”

Old infrastructure standards like DNS and new emerging environments like Web 2.0 provide a breeding ground for new security problems or black hat techniques.

Looking for a job - go into security.  This will be a big growing area.