Security News

Forescout Research Labs, in partnership with JSOF, disclosed a new set of DNS vulnerabilities, dubbed NAME:WRECK. These vulnerabilities affect four popular TCP/IP stacks - namely FreeBSD, IPnet, Nucleus NET and NetX - which are commonly present in well-known IT software and popular IoT/OT firmware and have the potential to impact millions of IoT devices around the world. More than 180,000 devices in the U.S. and more than 36,000 devices in the UK are believed to be affected.

Security researchers today disclosed nine vulnerabilities affecting implementations of the Domain Name System protocol in popular TCP/IP network communication stacks running on at least 100 million devices. It is not uncommon for DNS response packets to include the same domain name or a part of it more than once, so a compression mechanism exists to reduce the size of DNS messages.

It was a tsunami of DNS queries that ultimately took out a host of Microsoft services, from Xbox Live to Teams, for some netizens about an hour on April Fools' Day, Redmond has said. The web giant's Threat Analysis Group said it had detected in March a bogus security company SecuriElite reaching out to legit professionals via social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microsoft has revealed that Thursday's worldwide outage was caused by a code defect that allowed the Azure DNS service to become overwhelmed and not respond to DNS queries. Last night, Microsoft published a root cause analysis for this week's outage and explained that it was caused by their Azure DNS service becoming overloaded.

Google Chrome developers have announced plans to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS support to Chrome web browser for Linux. Yesterday, the open-source Chromium project which powers the Google Chrome web browser announced plans to release a Chrome for Linux version with DNS-over-HTTPS support.

Microsoft is testing a fix for performance issues in Microsoft Edge's DNS-over-HTTPS feature and has once again enabled a list of suggested DoH servers. DNS-over-HTTPS allows DNS resolution to be performed over an encrypted HTTPS connection rather than through normal plain text DNS lookups.

The U.S. National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency this week published joint guidance on Protective DNS. Designed to translate domain names into IP addresses, the Domain Name System is a key component of Internet and network communications. Protective DNS was designed as a security service that leverages the DNS protocol and infrastructure for the analysis of DNS queries and mitigation of possible threats.

A working proof-of-concept exploit is now publicly available for the critical SIGRed Windows DNS Server remote code execution vulnerability. SIGRed has existed in Microsoft's code for over 17 years, it impacts all Windows Server versions 2003 through 2019, and it has received a maximum severity rating of 10 out of 10.

The short-lived theft of Perl.com in late January is believed to have been the result of a social engineering attack that convinced registrar Network Solutions to alter the domain's records without valid authorization. The Register wrote about the domain takeover at the time and, as Foy put it, "The Register had spot-on reporting from the start as did Paul Ducklin at Sophos."

Boffins based in Belgium have found that a DNS-based technique for bypassing defenses against online tracking has become increasingly common and represents a growing threat to both privacy and security. In a research paper to be presented in July at the 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, KU Leuven-affiliated researchers Yana Dimova, Gunes Acar, Wouter Joosen, and Tom Van Goethem, and privacy consultant Lukasz Olejnik, delve into increasing adoption of CNAME-based tracking, which abuses DNS records to erase the distinction between first-party and third-party contexts.