DNS flaw exploitation danger growing

Slow patchers targeted by sophisticated attacks.

The serious vulnerability in the implementation of DNS systems has been targeted by malicious attacks, as security watchers have been predicting since the flaw was first disclosed.

With many developers and service providers yet to implement patching regimes for the issue, those still leaving their servers open for spoofing and redirection are beginning to see closely targeted and in some cases highly evolved attacks aimed at hijacking traffic for profit.

After initial disclosure timed to coincide with the monthly Patch Tuesday set of security updates, example exploit code was quickly made available, and

Microsoft

responded by issuing an

advisory alert

on July 25th, describing exploitation as ‘likely imminent’ and urging admins to patch their systems immediately. Since then attacks in the wild have been confirmed.

One exploitation attempt was spotted by H.D. Moore of

Metasploit

, which includes example exploit code of its own. The attack took advantage of US telecoms giant

AT&T

‘s slow response to the DNS issue, to redirect customers to spoofed

Google

pages pushing advertising. More on the story is in the

Register


here

with full details on Moore’ blog

here

.

Among others facing criticism for slow patching are

Apple

, who failed to respond urgently to the need to update the

BIND

DNS system in use on its

OSX Server

platform. More details are

here

.

Posted on 01 August 2008 by

Virus Bulletin