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Press Releases
Nominum Unveils the Industry's First DNS Armed Guard
Sep 4 2002
REDWOOD CITY, CA., September 4, 2002 - Nominum, a pioneer of Internet naming and address management solutions, announced today the availability of the Nominum DNS Response Validator (DRV). Nominum DRV blocks potential attacks on a widespread network vulnerability in business applications running on UNIX systems. The vulnerability is described in an alert issued recently from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).
For more information on the CERT alert: www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-19.html
All companies with an Internet presence rely on Domain Name System (DNS) software as a critical piece of their infrastructure. DNS translates text-based Internet domain names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and allows companies to be easily reached via the Internet. The CERT alert warns that an attacker could use malicious but legal DNS responses to crash or potentially hijack applications, including e-mail servers, web servers, databases and enterprise applications.
"This vulnerability is unlike any previously discovered DNS flaw," said Dave Kosiur, senior analyst at Burton Group. "Given that it targets applications rather than the DNS server itself, the potential threat is significantly broader, more harmful and more difficult to address."
The attack is very easy to trigger using something as simple as an incorrectly addressed e-mail message. When an e-mail server tries to notify the sender of an undeliverable message, it exposes itself and can be crashed or even taken over by someone who knows how to create malicious DNS responses. These are legal DNS responses and cannot be screened by a virus scanner, firewall or router. Nominum DRV sits at the perimeter of the enterprise network and provides an effective barrier securing applications from malicious DNS responses. By opening, inspecting and validating all DNS packets, Nominum DRV rejects those that pose a threat before any harm can be done.
At a recent Department of Defense DISA (Defense Information Services Agency) conference, Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the Domain Name System and Chief Scientist of Nominum, characterized the problem as widespread and serious. "Attackers could exploit this flaw and bring an organization's critical functions to a halt. There are only three ways to avoid the attack: Validating all DNS responses at the perimeter of the network, replacing all local name servers with caching name servers that validate responses, or mass retrofitting applications to eliminate the flaw, in the same way the Y2K bug was addressed."
Nominum DRV is available immediately to qualified beta testers. More information is available at www.nominum.com/products/DRV/.
About Nominum
Nominum is a pioneering provider of IP address infrastructure software for enterprises that require reliable and secure DNS, DHCP and IP address management for their mission critical networks. Nominum is driving the future of IP addressing. For more information about Nominum, go to www.nominum.com.
Contacts:
Nominum, Inc.
Laura Hendriksen
650-381-6018
laura.hendriksen@nominum.com
InterActive Public Relations
Melissa Hourigan
415-975-3355
melissa@ipri.com
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