Alarm raised on security flaw in Internet’s primary structure - Latter-day Paul Revere: ‘Don’t take for granted all the things that machines are doing for you’

New York Times

Since a secret emergency meeting of computer security experts at Microsoft’s headquarters in March, Dan Kaminsky has been urging companies around the world to fix a potentially dangerous flaw in the basic plumbing of the Internet.

While Internet service providers are racing to fix the problem, which makes it possible for criminals to divert computer users to fake Web sites where personal and financial information can be stolen, Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough.

By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations to make the necessary software changes before criminal hackers take advantage of the flaw…

…The flaw that Kaminsky discovered is in the domain name system, a kind of automated phone book that converts human-friendly addresses like google.com into machine-friendly numeric counterparts.

The potential consequences of the flaw are chilling. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to a fake site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The Web user would have no clue about the misdirection…

Click here to read entire story