DNS Security (Part 1 of 4)

I was going through my daily websites when I came across this headline:

Google warns hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/25/google-warns-hundreds-thousands-may-lose-internet-in-july/

Well, that certainly caught my attention and warranted closer examination.  At first glance, I thought it may have to do with the running out of IPv4 addresses, of which there are people who can not be reached on the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

But this article certainly does not indicate that.  Instead, it references a piece of malware which alters DNS such that the Internet appears normal but upon going to certain high-valued sites, notably banks, the user goes to a site which looks like their bank but is not.

This piece of malware isn’t always detected properly by anti-virus and anti-malware programs; so as such; various alphabet soup agencies of the United States government have been trying to get the word out about this.  But this is 2012.  If it isn’t viral on Youtube or some app, no one is going to notice.

So I’m going to go a short series on DNS, what this malware actually does, and most importantly for us botters, what we can do to make certain that this piece does not affect our business.