DNS Attack Writer a Victim of His Own Creation 196
BobB writes "HD Moore has been owned. Moore, the creator of the popular Metasploit hacking toolkit, has become the victim of a computer attack. It happened on Tuesday morning, when Moore's company, BreakingPoint, had some of its Internet traffic redirected to a fake Google page that was being run by a scammer. According to Moore, the hacker was able to do this by launching what's known as a cache poisoning attack on a DNS server on AT&T's network that was serving the Austin, Texas, area. One of BreakingPoint's servers was forwarding DNS (Domain Name System) traffic to the AT&T server, so when it was compromised, so was HD Moore's company."
DNS cache poisoning in the wild (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to see how widespread this exploit has become. I've checked my home and office connections using Dan Kaminsky's handy DNS Checker [doxpara.com] and it appears that my ISPs have taken measures to avoid this problem.
Unfortunately, I also travel a good deal for work, and it's hard to be sure that the ISP used by whatever-hotel-I'm-staying-at-this-week will be as proactive.
The guys in TFA got pwned by being redirected to a bogus Google look-alike page. As I understand it, this kind of attack would be noticeable when attempting to use a secure (HTTPS) web connection, because the browser should throw up a certificate error. Is this true? What other ways might be used to detect this problem?
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
If what you say is the case, and i don't know either way, then it might be like the word Draconian. Draco lived in a time where there were kings making up laws on the fly and inconsistently. He decided to write down these laws so folks could see them. Many of these laws were harsh, trivial or otherwise absurd. Somehow people decided to lay blame on Draco. So we call complex/harsh laws/rules Draconian.
Any history geeks on hand?
Re:Did he take it well? (Score:1, Interesting)
Not true. I heard that a stand up comedian in London died on stage, and nobody noticed until the corpse went cold.
You're probably thinking of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Cooper#Death_while_on_the_air
Re:Did he take it well? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know but the cultural differences are amusing. I got to take some clients out for dinner. We took them to a Mexican restaurant and they started to eat the appraisers with a knife and fork.
Well politely told them that traditionally you ate them with your fingers.
He smiled and said, "Where British, we will never eat anything with our fingers with out being instructed first."
He was also shocked that I liked a lot of British TV shows. He thought that Americans didn't get sarcasm.
Over all very nice people and his wife to be and my wife are now friends on FaceBook.