During the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, security engineer Dan Kaminsky presented the detailed analysis of the major flaw he discovered a few months ago in the Domain Name System (DNS), offering all the details needed in order to begin the development of a permanent fix.

According to his research, the vulnerability could allow criminals to redirect the Internet traffic to a certain remote address, for example being able to access a bank's protected resources and extract customer passwords.

The massive interest shown in the issue started several months back when Mr. Kaminsky, a security researcher for the IOActive company, addressed several Internet addressing software companies, warning them about the risks involved by not rapidly finding a solution.

Mr. Dan Kaminsky explained on his Web site that "After an enormous and secret effort, we've got fixes for all major platforms, all out on the same day. This has not happened before. Everything is genuinely under control." The success of this action was possible through Kaminsky's efforts to bring together all the major companies, knowing that such a collaboration is the only way of finding a fix that can be rapidly and successfully implemented for all platforms.

Even though at first the warnings and coverage on the issue were labeled as blown out of proportion, as soon as the details surfaced and the risks were fully acknowledged, the matter was indeed considered serious and the debates and efforts on finding the right fix significantly increased.

One way or another, the DNS is connected to many aspects of the Web, including e-mail, browsing, SSL, content delivery and anti-spam and this is precisely why a flaw related to it is being so intensely discussed