The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, July 31
Facebook drone set to fly this year...Windows 10 hit on browser choice...Hacker breaks into GM car using OnStar...and more tech news.
Facebook drone set to fly this year...Windows 10 hit on browser choice...Hacker breaks into GM car using OnStar...and more tech news.
Attackers could exploit a new vulnerability in BIND, the most popular Domain Name System (DNS) server software, to disrupt the Internet for many users.
The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), the organization that develops and maintains the widely used BIND DNS (Domain Name System) software, has patched a publicly disclosed vulnerability that can be used to remotely crash DNS servers running recent releases of BIND 9.
A flaw in the widely used BIND DNS (Domain Name System) software can be exploited by remote attackers to crash DNS servers and affect the operation of other programs running on the same machines.
Last week's flood of pornographic and violent images that <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/111511-facebook-users-hit-by-nasty-253153.html">hit Facebook</a> was a <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/111711-dont-blame-anonymous-for-facebook-253243.html">coordinated spam attack</a> that caught the attention of the world. But less remarked-upon and perhaps more sinister was what may have been a <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/111711-isc-patches-bind-denial-of-service-flaw-253226.html">denial-of-service attack on many organizations' DNS servers</a>, based on an exploit of the BIND 9 protocol, temporarily knocking their networks offline. The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), which maintains several software products essential for Internet infrastructure, released a patch that's something of an interim fix for this and said it would conduct an investigation. This kind of attack -- which incapacitates entire networks, as it did in this case -- is truly worrisome.