Global Server Change Annoucement
This announcement is a warning about changes that are going to take place on the internet beginning on the 5th of May. On the 5th of May a new change is going to be rolled out called DNSSEC which will be used in addition with the DNS protocols that are used by computers all over the world to resolve your host names in your IP address.
This change will be released by the internets governing agency as well as Verisign. This type of coding is going too be used to prevent what’s known in the computer world as a “man in the middle” attack. These attacks are used in order to redirect you from your originally intended web site and send you to one of the hackers choosing. More often than not the sites that are put up by hackers are identical to the page that you were originally trying visit. This typically prompts most people to enter their log in information in the incorrect site, which gives that log in information to the hacker. This is a technique known in the hacker community as phishing. Phishing can typically be avoided with the addition of a captcha code, but some man in the middle attacks function on an IP address level which means that there’s virtually no way for you to tell the difference between the malicious page and the one that you were originally intending to visit. Here are some of the positives
What are the positives
1. DNSSEC functions by signing the DNS records which are on the authoritative name server, and publishing the public part of the signing key in a previously determined special record zone. This can then be seen by clients so that they can verify that they actually received a response from the name server with has the authority to respond from that zone.
2. This kind of protocol will halt the majority of man in the middle attacks and make it far more difficult for hackers to get a hold of special and/or sensitive information. There are a number of DNS servers already online that have begun to implement the DNSSEC protocol, but as of may fifth the thirteen root servers will have zone signing enabled. Root DNS servers are still at the very top of the internet hierarchy and will continue to be used to resolve top level domains like .com .net and .org. This is one of the most important steps forward as this ensure that the trust of the responding name server can request to be verified all the way down to it’s DNS system. This means that most users can now be confident that they will not end up receiving malicious coding.
However as with all things in addition to the positives there are negatives as well. We’re going to look at some of those negatives here.
What are the negatives
1. If you have an older server than it’s more than likely that the server isn’t going to be able to handle the kinds of packet transfers that are going to be necessary to implement this new technology.
2. The majority of server runners are unaware of this upcoming change and therefore have not tested their servers, which means that if you’re on a server and it hasn’t been tested you could lose your ability to connect to the internet at all.
3. Outdated ISP’s will not be able to handle the data and therefore will consequently no longer be able to ferry you to the online sites you wish to visit.
In conclusion you’re going to want to test your ISP to make sure that it’s still going to run while using these new packets, otherwise you could have a great deal of trouble getting back online.
