DNS Flaw Hits More Than Just the Web

gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation." Update: 08/07 19:48 GMT by T : There's also an animation of the progress of the patch.

Comments

Re:Litmus testing

[causality]

If by "lefty" you mean "statist" (they seem to be synonymous since every leftist plan of action I have ever heard of would imply increasing government power and size) then I don't know about that one. Such statists love television and newspapers which are essentially one-to-many media that don't afford much (if any) opportunity to confront them. They usually don't do so well in a forum where anyone can can rebut them. That's not to say that I haven't also noticed such positions being taken more often on Slashdot, just that they don't thrive here the way they do in other media.

When I say that "leftist" and "statist" seem synonymous, I have doubts about whether that's what true leftists really believe in. Many say that they don't, but who knows? In politics the face value of what people say means very little to me. Personally, I think they mean well and the hardcore statists (the ones who would like to see a place like the USA become a dictatorship or a police state) find their ideas to be very convenient excuses for expanding governmental power. This is where people fail to realize, time and time again, that most of the harm done in this world is not done intentionally by people with malicious intentions; most of the harm in this world is done unintentionally by people with good intentions and very little foresight.