"DNS flaw is much worse than first thought"

IN A TALK at the Black Hat conference in Las Vega on Wednesday, security researcher Dan Kaminsky said that the systemic Internet Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability he discovered some months ago is much more dangerous than most have appreciated....

"Every network is at risk," Kaminsky told the overflow crowd gathered for his presentation. "That's what this flaw has shown." He said that what little he'd initially revealed about the DNS vulnerability, and the later leak of more details about it, was only the tip of an iceberg that he called the worst Internet security risk to surface since 1997....

Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack many other applications, protocols and services, including email services and spam filters, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and other data transmission protocols such as Rsync and BitTorrent, Telnet and Secure Shell (SSH) remote login services, as well as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) services that supposedly secure online banking, retail sales, auctions -- indeed nearly all online financial transactions.