Heartbleed SSL Bug, DNS and the Perils of a Monoculture
The Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL highlights a critical vulnerability in the structure of the Internet: lack of diversity in critical software and hardware that run everything. Use of “free” open source software and commodity hardware enables a lot of applications and services to be delivered inexpensively but also leaves critical infrastructure open to exploitation […]
Water Torture: A Slow Drip DNS DDoS Attack
A number of our service provider customers around the world are reporting that they see a new type of DNS DDoS attack that uses the DNS as the attack vector. The service providers themselves do not appear to be the target of this attack. Instead, the attack tries to overwhelm an outside victim’s authoritative DNS […]
Firezilla FTP
Recently, a fake version of the popular Filezilla File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client has been made available for download on some sites. This fake version of Filezilla looks and works as expected but it also harvests login credentials in the background. These credentials are secretly sent to a hacker owned site. This is clearly a […]
DNS prefetching in browsers
Some browsers such as Firefox implement various types of prefetching. The basic idea is that the browser will start to preload hyperlinked pages in the background to so that once a user clicks on a link the web page will already be ready to be displayed. Speculative prefetching like this is obviously wasteful from a […]
RFC 7050 – Next step in IPv6 readiness for service providers
IETF recently announced the publication of RFC 7050 – “Discovery of the IPv6 Prefix Used for IPv6 Address Synthesis”. This is an interesting RFC that will help service providers transition their customers to an IPv6 only network. I’m happy to have been contributing with minor suggestions to the authors around how the DNS pieces of […]
Lies, damn lies and DNS performance statistics
To paraphrase Mark Twain (and Benjamin Disraeli if internet search results can be trusted), there are three kinds of DNS lies: lies, damn lies and DNS performance statistics. Most networking professionals know to have a healthy skepticism about information put out by the marketing departments of networking vendors. And so they should. It is the […]
