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DNS Poisoning Vulnerability: If You Haven't Yet Patched, It May Be Too Late

If you've ignored the urge to patch Dan Kaminsky's DNS cache poisoning flaw, you could be on the verge of big trouble: Exploit code has just been published in a popular penetration testing tool.

In case you've not been keeping up on all the rage in infosec for the past couple of weeks, security researcher Kaminsky announced his discovery of a DNS cache poisoning vulnerability at the same time dozens of vendors announced the availability of their fixes. Colleague Mike Fratto went into considerable detail here, here, and here.

Essentially, the Domain Name Systems (DNS) that are left unfixed could be susceptible to having all of their Web traffic and e-mail redirected, and thereby snooped upon, to a system under the attacker's control.

Today, about a day after the specific details of the DNS vulnerability were released, exploit code that makes it possible to pollute DNS cache with malicious records has been added to the Metasploit security tool. That announcement is available here.

From the description of the exploit code bulletin:

This exploit targets a fairly ubiquitous flaw in DNS implementations which allow the insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of the target nameserver. This exploit caches a single malicious host entry into the target nameserver. By causing the target nameserver to query for random hostnames at the target domain, the attacker can spoof a response to the target server including an answer for the query, an authority server record, and an additional record for that server, causing target nameserver to insert the additional record into the cache.

How many days before we learn of major sites being attacked?

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