Security & Privacy

Security researchers have gotten together for a rare concerted effort in issuing patches to fix a security flaw in the DNS system, the addressing scheme used to convert numerical IP addresses into names. As CNet reports, “Currently, it may be possible to guess these transaction ID values in advance and assert a malicious server as the authoritative DNS server for a popular bank or e-commerce site.”

Vendors of DNS servers have begun issuing patches, and vendors of DNS clients have been contacted. In addition, vendors in countries other than the US will be contacted via their country’s computer security organizations. The vulnerability will be made public in one month, so all those working with DNS servers and clients will have to patch their hardware by then. However, the article does not state what will happen if such devices are not patched, and if users will have any way of knowing that they are using insecure DNS servers.