Okay- it’s been a crazy 36 hours since Dan Kaminsky released his information on the massive multivendor patch and DNS issue. I want to give a little background on how I’ve been involved (for full disclosure) as well as some additional aspects of this. If you hate long stories, the short version is he just walked me through the details, this is a very big deal, and you need to patch immediately.

Dan contacted me about a week or so ago to help get the word out to the CIO-level audience. As an analyst, that’s a group I have more access to. I was involved with the initial press conference and analyst briefings, and helped write the executive overview to put the issue in non-geek terms.

At the time he just gave me the information that was later made public. I’ve known Dan for a few years now and trust him, so I didn’t push as deeply as I would with someone I don’t have that relationship with. Thus, as the comments and other blogs dropped into a maelstrom of discontent, I didn’t have anything significant to add.

Dan realized he underestimated the response of the security community and decided to let me, Ptacek, Dino, and someone else I won’t mention into the fold.

Here’s the deal- Dan has the goods. More goods than I expected. Dino and Ptacek agree. Tom just issued a public retraction/apology. This is absolutely one of the most exceptional research projects I’ve seen. Dan’s reputation will emerge more than intact, although he will still have some black eyes for not disclosing until Black Hat.

Here’s what you need to know:

  1. You must patch your name servers as soon as possible. This is real, it’s probably not what you’re thinking. It’s a really good exploit (which is bad news for us).
  2. Ignore the “Important” rating from Microsoft, and other non-critical ratings. You have to keep in mind that for many of those organizations nothing short of remote code execution without authentication will result in a critical rating. That’s how the systems are built.
  3. Dan screwed up some of his handling of this, and I’m part of that screwup since I set my cynical analyst hat aside and ran totally on trust and reputation. Now that I know more, I stand behind my reaction and statements, but that’s a bad habit for me to get into.
  4. This still isn’t the end of the world, but it’s serious enough you should break your patch cycle (if you have one) on name servers to get them fixed. Then start rolling out to the rest of your infrastructure.
  5. CERT is updating their advisory on an ongoing basis. It’s located here.

Next time something like this happens I’ll push for full details sooner, but Dan is justified in limiting exposure of this. His Black Hat talk will absolutely rock this year.

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