Image via WikipediaDan Kaminsky
Regular readers at Wordout will probably not recognize that name. For the last several years, Dan has spent his time doing security analysis for some really big firms. He’s good.
As a matter of fact, he’s world-class good. A couple of months ago he discovered a vulnerability in the Domain Name System which, if I understand it correctly, could have been used to exploit practically every computer on the internet, regardless of operating system or browser. It was a seriously big hole.
Thankfully, Dan is one of the good guys. He worked with engineers from around the world to fix the problem. Then he did something really neat. He posted this video on his site DoxPara Research, showing the repair progress worldwide. Want to see what it looks like when the internet backbone gets fixed? Check it out… here’s the color key:
Red — Unpatched
Yellow — Patched, but the NAT is screwing things up
Green — OK
I just think that’s one of the coolest videos I’ve seen on the web.
I am Jon, and thanks to Dan, my DNS is just fine.
