"Just one multi-million-dollar corporate data breach away from waking up"

Very scary paper by David Dagon, Niels Provos, Christopher P. Lee, and Wenke Lee.

Good summary of its implications by Kelly Jackson Higgins in Dark Reading.

The industry is just one multi-million-dollar corporate data breach away from waking up to the serious and often-silent threat of corrupted DNS resolution servers, says DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris.

Mockapetris--who is also chief scientist and chairman of the board for network naming and address vendor Nominum--says the recent research on corrupted DNS resolution servers by researchers at Georgia Tech and Google demonstrates yet another way the bad guys are attacking DNS to infect users. (See Hacking a New DNS Attack .)

Researchers David Dagon, Chris Lee, and Wenke Lee of Georgia Tech, and Google's Niels Provos, dubbed the new threat "DNS resolution path corruption,” where malicious DNS servers provide false information in order to send users to malicious sites. The researchers officially presented their findings today at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in San Diego.

In their study of DNS resolution, they found around 17 million open-recursive DNS servers on the Net, and discovered that about .4 percent, or 68,000 of them, are performing malicious operations by answering DNS queries with false information that sends them to malicious sites. About 2 percent are returning suspicious results, they reported.

“This report demonstrates that people are getting lured out to dark alleyways of the Internet. The actual damage isn’t documented here, but it will be” somewhere when someone loses the first $10 million to $100 million to this type of attack, Mockapetris says.

Surely the Department of Homeland Security is working feverishly to block this threat to the very core of the Internet? Don't bet on it.