Apple lags behind in DNS bug fix
I am as big an Apple fangrrl as anyone, but lately Apple has just not been making happy news for me to write about. The company seems to be bound and determined to destroy all of the positive reputation it has built up over the years with a series of bad decisions and snafus.
The latest in this long line of mea culpas is their fumbling of the DNS repair that had everyone so up in arms in recent months. The security flaw was in the BIND (Berkley Internet Name Domain) and was discovered by Dan Kaminsky.
The bug was bad enough that companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Sun an others banded together to find the best and fastest way to fix it. This group of industry heavy hitters did indeed figure out how to fix the bug on July 8th.
With more than 20 days to implement the fix, the fact that Apple has not yet done so as of this article is a slap in the face to loyal Apple customers. Even Rich Mogull, an independent security consultant, weighed in on it:
“It’s not sending a real good message,” he complains. “If they don’t patch this in a reasonable time, they’re putting their customers at risk.”
It’s true that not many people use BIND on the Apple OS x servers, and that those that do may already have the knowledge it takes to repair the bug themselves. Even so, Apple should be addressing the issue and they are not, which has Kaminsky and others like him concerned.
Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), creators of BIND, were the ones who released the patch on July 8th. They think that Apple users would be happy with even a token, one line acknowledgement of the DNS issue and a statement that it was being worked on, but Apple has remained mum on the subject.
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