Simple attacks could take out the internet? Hmmm, not exactly news. A group of researchers from Cornell discovered this information.
They also found that if the simple attacks were combined with so-called denial-of-service attacks, 85% of the net becomes vulnerable to take-over.
The crew from L0pht testified about this back in the day. There is a piece over on BBC from this past Friday on a DNS attack.
One site vulnerable in this way was run by the FBI, said Professor. Sirer. Although the five computers that act as the first reference point for the fbi.gov domain were secure, one of the five that connect to these has yet to install a patch for a well-known bug.
By putting together spolits and DoS attacks 85% of domains on the internet could be taken out. No sh!t Sherlock.
The hierarchical structure of the net’s address books could be replaced with a more resilient system, he said, that uses a peer-to-peer type structure that would be harder to compromise.
Meh.
(Thanks to Myrcurial for the link)
[tags]DNS, Denial of Service, Internet[/tags]
