Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC
This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Everything You Need to Know About DNS AttacksIt's important to understand DNS, potential attacks against it, and the tools and techniques required to defend DNS infrastructure. This report answers all the questions you were afraid to ask.
Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical part of any organization's digital infrastructure, but it's also one of the least understood. DNS is designed to be invisible to business professionals, IT stakeholders, and many security professionals, but DNS's threat surface is large and widely targeted.
Attackers are causing a great deal of damage with an array of attacks such as denial of service, DNS cache poisoning, DNS hijackin, DNS tunneling, and DNS dangling. They are using DNS infrastructure to take control of inbound and outbound communications and preventing users from accessing the applications they are looking for. To stop attacks on DNS, security teams need to shore up the organization's security hygiene around DNS infrastructure, implement controls such as DNSSEC, and monitor DNS traffic
Incident Readiness and Building Response Playbook
In this special report, learn the Xs and Os of any good security incident readiness and response playbook.
Tweet This
1 Comments
User Rank: Strategist
5/12/2018 | 10:29:41 AM
The real problem here, as it always is with SMS-based 2FA where a message is sent to the user, is excatly that: that the message is sent TO the user.
Text messages sent to phones are, by definition, both unencrypted and easy to intercept, as Mr. Mitnick has amply demonstrated. The answer to this problem is to reverse the process and have the user authenticate their login or identity by sending a message FROM their phone.
Here's why this works: the U.S. short code system eliminates spoofing of phone numbers thanks to the carriers. Cloning/spoofing/duplicating SIMs and IMEIs is a problem for carriers for a simple reason: the lose money when someone doesn't pay for another line. They solved this problem long ago by implementing a barrier that has yet to be successfully hacked.
This more secure approach reverses the process by having the user send a text from their device into an independent third-party server. The server then makes a secure handshake with the web page where the authentication is occurring. This completely eliminates the type of attack Mr. Mitnick successfully used (man-in-the-middle or man-in-the-browser) and confirms that the inbound SMS has come from the right number, registered IMEI and contains the right code. I welcome Mr. Mitnick to test the system. I will be happy to provide him with complete information about it and give him a test account.
Nothing is unhackable (although ours has not yet been successfully hacked) but we are confident that SnapID is substanially LESS hackable than any other SMS-based 2FA method on the market.