If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and view my previous post about this Dangerous DNS Problem:

http://www.funkytower.com/2008/08/06/dangerous-dns-problem/

DNS is what has revolutionized and, in many ways, helped create the spectacular online environment we have today, know as the World Wide Web.  We use DNS for virtually everything, from e-mail, to myspace, to online banking, to having internet access itself.  DNS is what converts an ip address (a bunch of numbers that identify a system) to a name like www.funkytower.com, or pop.domain.com, etc.  The flaw which has been found is very scary, as it can potentially change the course of our entire life.  This flaw could allow malicious persons  to duplicate any domain name.

“How could this change the course of my entire life?” you ask?  Simply this: say you went to www.wamu.com to work on your bank account, you enter in your information, log in, and everything seems fine - but what you wouldn’t know is you were logging in to a fake website that looks exactly like www.wamu.com, and you just gave all of your bank information to a complete stranger.  Next thing you know, all your money is gone and there is no possible way to have it recovered.

What an awful fear to have to live with.  There currently is no solution for this problem either.  Many engineers and developers have come up with patches for this problem - but it doesn’t solve it.  All it does, is make the problem alot harder to access.  This is not good enough to me.

I’m on a bit of a vacation here in Oregon and I keep having this slight fear in the back of my mind “I hope no one has managed to hack into my bank account and all my money is gone” and “I hope no one gained my password to my Paypal account!”

What causes people to do such things that we even have to worry about something like this?  Sadly, the world we live in today is hardly safe.  We are already worried about identity theft without hearing much about this problem.

I cannot wait until the day when this problem finally comes to an end.

Take it easy,
David

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Personal, Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.