DNS Security Enhancement: Significant DNSSec Deployment Against Attacks

The typical end-of-year security story generally involves a looming cyber threat or yet another major misstep by Microsoft. Well, there's good news on the security front this year -- and, like our other picks, it's gone largely unnoticed. A major hole in security has been plugged with the full deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSec) at the Internet's authoritative root zone. (InfoWorld awarded one of the main drivers of fixing the flaw in its CTO 25 awards earlier this year, but little has been said since.)

The extensions will make it much more difficult for black hats to engage in cache poisoning, an attack that strikes at the fundamental nature of the Internet. "If you can't trust your DNS server, you can't trust anything," says Paul Smith, a senior analyst for Symantec's Hosted Services division.

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