Open DNS servers pose a danger to your website

13th April 2006

Where you choose to have your website hosted can be exteremly important. Many prominent web hosting companies are dragging their feet and leaving your business at risk.

Nearly a month ago, on March 13, the webmaster for SEOConsultants.com posted a warning on the Webmaster World website, explaining a threat that has become mainstream concern, called DNS Recursion, and Open DNS servers.

They provided the link to DNS Reports, so I checked to see if the PDXTC servers were at risk, and they were. Rob and Justin at Weberz are my server managers experts, and they had it fixed right away.

Three weeks later, this issue has become known as “The Katrina of Net attacks”, yet many server administrators seem to be ignoring this risk, or are unaware of how to fix it.

Here’s the CNET news story

To make a long story short, having a DNS server that allows recursion for the Internet is like running an open SMTP relay. (sic - Open SMTP relay = very bad, and you’re asking for trouble)

The Good Guys have found over half a million. The Bad Guys will find yours. Bad guys will use spoofed UDP packets to fire-and-forge large DNS requests, and the recursing server will send the fragmented replies to the victim (the forged source of the UDP). There are rumblings by very smart people to “do something about this”. - http://www.webmasterworld.com

To see if your website is at risk, check your own domain name and the domain of your web hosting company here at DNS Reports.

Then, demand that your hosting company keep you safe, which they could likely do in under an hour…

If that fails to satisfy you, sign up for a better web hosting company, like PDXTC!

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	I wrote this post on on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 6:02 am and is filed in my Technology News, Web Hosting category. You can follow any comments to this post through this RSS 2.0 RSS feed. Feel free to leave a comment, by scrolling past any others you may see below.