I have been watching a lot of the reaction to the DNS vulnerability that was revealed by Dan Kaminsky and multiple vendors yesterday.
There has been a few people who have downplayed the seriousness of the situation and for those of you still in doubt that this is a serious situation, I will point you to the retraction by Thomas Ptacek over at Matasano Chargen. Mr. Ptacek has always been one to stick to his guns when challenged about his postings and it shows the seriousness of the situation.
I think Microsoft is underplaying the seriousness of the situation by only rating the patch important. This will probably change as soon as there is an exploit in the wild. I think that is unfortunate, DNS is core to the way we traverse the Internet - you got to this blog via DNS, I posted it using DNS and all e-mail is delivered via DNS. DNS is core to the way we work.
There are servers that have been found to not be suceptible to this vulnerability. The first was DJBDNS. Dan Kaminsky did announce that there is another secure DNS server: PowerDNS made by Bret Huber. OpenDNS has stated in their blog that their implementation is secure against this vulnerabilty, which makes me feel better since I use them at home.
If you run a DNS server and you are not sure that you are vulnerable, check the CERT advisory for your vendors status. If your vendor is listed as anything other than not vulnerable, follow the link to your vendors website.
Be safe out there,
James
