Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: More about NSI Servers Attack(?) - intriguing short analysis
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 03:19:31 -0500
From: "Robert Raisch" <raisch () internautics com> To: "Dave Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu> (To me, this is fascinating, as it is just one more way users have identified and exploited yet another loophole in a critical service. And NSI's response seems amazingly ill considered. /rr)
From Need To Know - <*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>
http:www.ntk.net The .com artists, NETWORK SOLUTIONS, got hit with more nasty hacks by domain name speculators. People are now reserving .com addresses, sitting out the thirty days before you have to pay up, and then - just before NSI's automated system releases the domain again - bludgeoning the Internic servers with thousands of new reservation requests. That lets the speculators hold domain names indefinitely without paying a penny. It also crashes NSI's servers, as the more worthy (or less sneaky) domain masters have discovered. Network Solution's answer has been intriguing: instead of devising a more sophisticated reservation system (genuine name & address authentication? PGP registration? actually holding people to the requirement that they have valid DNS servers?), they've simply deleted the "Status" and "Last changed" fields from the whois database without telling anyone. You'll note that this a) potentially busts other programs, b) doesn't solve the problem, since the domain name speculators already *know* when they reserved the domain. Network Solutions - placing the emphasis on neither. -- Rob Raisch, Internet Hired Gun <http://www.raisch.com/>
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- IP: More about NSI Servers Attack(?) - intriguing short analysis Dave Farber (Jan 24)