Internet Systems Consortium probes name server crash

The Internet Systems Consortium has advised users of the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) name servers to update soonest, even as it investigates a series of crashes of BIND 9 domain name system (DNS) servers across the Internet. UK's The Register reported the ISC noted an "unidentified network event" caused BIND 9 resolvers to cache an invalid record, and crash when subsequent queries requested the invalid record. BIND has been a favorite target for black-hat hackers who can exploit its bugs to redirect users to counterfeit sites to harvest data like account IDs and passwords, it noted. In the latest case, The Register said the flaw may be exploited to attack networks, with multiple members of the BIND users email list from Germany, France and the US reporting simultaneous crashes across multiple servers. But Blair Strang, a security consultant at Australian company SenseOfSecurity, said that while the situation is “serious," the “sky is not falling." Strang said past incidents have made BIND developers paranoid, such that they ramped up the safety checks inside their code over the years. He said the crash may be due to the safety checks. “The name server knows ‘something has gone wrong’ and exits as a defensive measure. The security checks were added in BIND 9 because BIND 8 got hammered; several exploits were released for it, which is several too many for one of the essential services holding the Internet together," he said. He added the current vulnerability is still mysterious, and added that “the patch from the BIND guys doesn't actually fix the bug – it just papers over the crash caused by the assertion (this situation could probably change during the day as people find out more)." Since the BIND developers don’t yet know what payload triggered the crash, remote code execution is feasible, he said. “Let's hope it remains a denial of service condition," he added. — TJD, GMA News