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DNS expert: More sophisticated Internet attacks coming
MARCH 21, 2003
Last October's denial-of-service attacks against the Domain Name System (DNS) were only the opening salvo in what will inevitably be far more sophisticated attacks against the Internet's core addressing system, according to Paul Mockapetris, one of the designers of DNS. With the 20th anniversary of DNS coming in April, Mockapetris this week talked about some of the new dangers facing the DNS infrastructure and measures that are being taken to better protect against them.
Was [cybersecurity czar] Richard Clarke right when he identified the DNS and Border Gate Protocols (BGP) as the two major vulnerabilities in the Internet infrastructure? Yeah. I refer to them as the traffic signals and the street signs of the Internet. If you are able to subvert [them], you can bring the Internet to its knees.
Is the DNS infrastructure secure enough today for commercial-grade applications? The initial system was good enough for host addressing and maybe for mail routing. But in the future, if you want to be able to handle transactions for everybody and you want to be able to put things that involve real money over the Internet, you'd like to be able to have something that is a little bit more secure.
More details at: http://computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,79576,00.html
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