HD Moore, the creator of the Metasploit penetration testing framework, and a hacker who goes by the alias "I)ruid" have launched attack code exploiting the DNS flaw made public earlier this month by Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at Seattle-based IOActive Inc.

The code only runs on Linux, and a Mac OS X version will be available soon. The exploit will allegedly never be able to run on Windows, which means attackers or testers will need to use on of the above platforms to launch a DNS attack.

The vulnerabilities in the Domain Name System (DNS) enable a remote attacker to redirect network traffic intended for systems on the Internet to another address, usually the attacker’s own systems. This is done by replacing the legitimate addresses in a DNS server's cache with bogus entries.

The issue points out that the current Domain Name System (DNS) is outdated, and switching to the newer Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is imperative. While DNS provides various information associated with domain names, primarily returning the IP address of a certain hostname, DNSSEC does this in a different way, because answers in DNSSEC are digitally signed.

Deploying DNSSEC at the root level of the Internet Domain System will prevent many spam and spoof attacks and force Internet crooks to find other means of attacking users.

Apparently, even two weeks after the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system which translates domain names into IP numbers of their respective servers, more than half of all DNS servers are still vulnerable.

At the time when security researcher Dan Kaminsky publicized the flaw, nearly 90 percent of all DNS servers around the world were potential targets.

Meanwhile, attack code is readily available, but ISPs are still dragging their feet and are delaying the necessary security updates.