ISP typo farming exposes users to fraudulent web pages

[K1u]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/20/ka...emo_at_toorcon/

ToorCon Comcast, Verizon and at least 70 other internet service providers are putting their customers at serious risk in their quest to make money from mistyped web addresses, security researcher Dan Kaminsky says.

Speaking at the ToorCon security conference in Seattle, Kaminsky demonstrated an exploit class he dubbed PiTMA, short for provider-in-the-middle attacks. A variation of man-in-the-middle attacks, it stole authentication cookies and injected arbitrary content into trusted web pages by exploiting weaknesses in an ad server Earthlink used when returning results for non-existent addresses.

Once upon a time, mistyped domain names resulted in a browser returning a simple 404 error that said the address didn't exist. Then ISPs realized they could make money by returning a failure notice that included banner ads and other content. This ad injection is done through the magic of the domain name system. As a result, browsers get fooled into thinking a request for qww.microsoft.com is a legitimate address that's controlled by the same network responsible for www.microsoft.com.

"Guys, anything goes wrong on that subdomain [and] it is an element of the parent," Kaminsky said. "It can access cookies, it can do other things. Normally a subdomain is trusted by the parent. Not this time."

[tim.vangehugten]

When notified of the error, "BareFruit defecated masonry" and "fixed the bug in about 27 minutes after they heard what they were up to," Kaminsky said.

A part of the problems is solved if you read on. But many servers are still vurnable. Thanks for posting it

Why do people always have to get a warning before they act?