LAS VEGAS -- When Dan Kaminsky disclosed last month that he'd discovered a serious vulnerability in the Domain Name System that would allow hackers to subvert DNS servers and send web surfers to malicious web sites, DNS server owners scrambled to apply a patch to fix the flaw. Kaminsky said today in his talk about the security vulnerability at the Black Hat Security Conference that 120 million broadband consumers are now protected, thanks to DNS servers being patched in the thirty days since news of the bug went public. But many users have been wary of trusting the patched servers or have sought alternatives while waiting for their DNS server to be patched. One alternative Kaminsky recommended last month was to use OpenDNS -- which wasn't affected by the vulnerability. According to OpenDNS founder and CEO David Ulevitch, the service has seen a huge increase in traffic in one month. Prior to July 13 when Kaminsky announced the flaw, OpenDNS was handling 5.6 billion queries a day. Now it's handling 7 billion. Ulevitch says they're seeing a lot of Fortune 500 companies switching to OpenDNS rather than run their own DNS structure. Ulevitch says OpenDNS, which launched two years ago, has had no problem handling the upsurge in traffic and welcomes more. "I don't know if I want to use the quote 'bring it on' but we can certainly handle what we're doing today and we can do many, many times more," he says. ...
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