How One Man Nearly Destroyed the Internet

News Type: Event — Seeded on Tue Dec 2, 2008 8:15 AM EST

Article Source: Wired News

On a drizzly Sunday afternoon, he flopped down on his bed, flipped open his laptop, and started playing games with DNS. He used a software program called Scapy to fire random queries at the system. He liked to see how it would respond and decided to ask for the location of a series of nonexistent Web pages at a Fortune 500 company. Then he tried to trick his DNS server in San Diego into thinking that he knew the location of the bogus pages.
Suddenly it worked. The server accepted one of the fake pages as real. But so what? He could now supply fake information for a page nobody would ever visit. Then he realized that the server was willing to accept more information from him. Since he had supplied data about one of the company's Web pages, it believed that he was an authoritative source for general information about the company's domain. The server didn't know that the Web page didn't exist—it was listening to Kaminsky now, as if it had been hypnotized.

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Jonathan D. Miller's Column, All of Newsvine
Groups: GeekVine, Linux Users, Texvine community, The Infinite Loop, Web 2.0
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6.1

{"commentId":4261086,"authorDomain":"onlineapps"}

Andy Min

Lesson here: Don't let geeks exercise. Especially sprints.

{"commentId":4261086,"threadId":"432742","contentId":"2168534","authorDomain":"onlineapps"}

3 votes

#1 - Tue Dec 2, 2008 2:19 PM EST

{"commentId":4261777,"authorDomain":"jdmiller82"}

Jonathan D. Miller

I try to put myself in his position, that of discovering such a flaw. Personally I would have been tempted to shut down the whole internet. Then my name would live in infamy!

Or better yet I'd write a program that would randomly redirect websites, so you think you are going to google, but end up on craigslist. Now that would be fun!

{"commentId":4261777,"threadId":"432742","contentId":"2168534","authorDomain":"jdmiller82"}

3 votes

#1.1 - Tue Dec 2, 2008 3:02 PM EST

{"commentId":4274976,"authorDomain":"onlineapps"}

Andy Min

Haha... that would have been interesting.

Digg.com -> Newsvine.com -> Reddit.com -> ...

{"commentId":4274976,"threadId":"432742","contentId":"2168534","authorDomain":"onlineapps"}

3 votes

#1.2 - Wed Dec 3, 2008 1:15 PM EST

{"commentId":4284782,"authorDomain":"rncostarica"}

Richard-594237

Please.... anywhere but craigslist. Too cruel. ;)

{"commentId":4284782,"threadId":"432742","contentId":"2168534","authorDomain":"rncostarica"}

2 votes

#1.3 - Thu Dec 4, 2008 1:16 AM EST

{"canLink":false,"threadId":"432742","isPrivate":false}

JONATHAN D. MILLER

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How One Man Nearly Destroyed the Internet

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