More than half of all computers still unprotected against critical Internet flaw

About 52 percent of users are still vulnerable to a critical flaw in the Internet infrastructure which exposes them to hacker attacks, said Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher who discovered a critical flaw and then disclosed it a couple of weeks ago.

In a conference call, Kaminsky said that more than half of those visiting his Doxpara site (where he has a test program to detect the protection) have not yet implemented a patch to protect them from the flaw in the so-called Domain Name Service servers that hold the address locations for all the web sites on the Internet. But Kaminsky said that percentage was much better than the 86 percent that were unprotected in the days shortly following the disclosure of the bug on July 8.

To recap, Kaminsky found a bug early this year that could have allowed hackers to redirect traffic from any web site to their own malicious web sites. He said he knew how big the problem was, so he told only key security vendors and government overseers. They convened a special meeting at Microsoft and figured out a way to fix, or patch, the bug. Over six months, they came up with a solution to fix the problem. No companies balked at the expense, Kaminsky said, because they realized the gravity of the bug.