Particulars on the DNS flaw uncovered by safety researcher Dan Kaminsky have observed their way in to the public arena. Kaminsky, who's the director of penetration testing for that protection provider IOActive, had planned on maintaining the specifics of his discovery shut to his vest right up until the Black Hat conference in August in Las Vegas. Now, the particulars of his findings appear to have leaked out by accident. The flaw, which can be exploited to launch DNS (Domain Title Strategy) cache poisoning attacks towards DNS servers and redirect Internet traffic, was discovered by Kaminsky several months ago and led a number of vendors to cooperate and coordinate the release of a patch two weeks ago. This is an important flaw that affects multiple productsbasically any recursive DNS server. If a server is compromised, attackers could redirect traffic from that server to anywhere they wanted, say, to a ######## "google.com" that was actually a malicious site. Reverse engineering expert and Zynamics CEO Halvar Flake posted speculation about the bug on a blog July 21. In response, protection research and development firm Matasano,
Microsoft Office 2007, which was aware of the true details of the flaw, posted confirmation of Flake's speculation on the Matasano service blog. The Matasano post has since been taken down,
Office Professional Plus 2010, but remains alive courtesy of a Google search. "The cat is out in the bag," read the now-removed Matasano post. "Yes, Halvar Flake figured out the flaw Dan Kaminsky will announce at Black Hat." Late the same day, Matasano's Thomas Ptacek apologized on the company blog,
Office 2010 Activation, explaining the firm had "dropped the ball." Ptacek wrote,
Cheap Office 2007, "Earlier today, a safety researcher posted their hypothesis regarding Dan Kaminsky's DNS finding. Shortly afterwards, when the story began getting traction,
Office Professional Plus, a post appeared on our blog about that hypothesis. It was posted in error. We regret that it ran. We removed it from the blog as soon as we saw it. Unfortunately, it takes only seconds for Internet publications to spread." Kaminsky's attempts to keep a tight lid on facts of your flaw till Black Hat sparked controversy among some safety professionals who felt information in the vulnerability should have been released. For now, IT pros can fall back on the patches vendors have made available, as well as suggested mitigations. Kaminsky has posted a tool on his Web site that allows anyone to check to see if a DNS server is vulnerable. DNSstuff launched a piece of freeware July 16 on its site that does the same. "Patch," Kaminsky advised on his blog. "Today. Now."