Firewalls, Antivirus, Antiphishing etc. - all useless against this one... http://www.doxpara.com/ (see WSJ, BBC etc.) Ok, I'm not techie but I try to be aware of security isues. So this bug was discovered and quietly fixed before the bad guys found out we all could be duped into giving out our ID's, account numbers etc. Now if I was a hacker I'd mimic broker sites. So I download the MS patch and use the DNS checker. Still comes up vulnerable to DNS poisoning. Has anyone tried the MS patch and did it work?
The patch has to be applied to your pc and to every server on the internet that your internet page request passes through. Microsoft wrote the patches for the end user personal computers and for servers on the internet where all the data passes through. Diligent pc users will apply the patch to their pc, but if your isp/network provider or any other server in which your data passes through the internet backbone does not patch their server, you are vulnerable to attack. I think this will take months for all servers that route traffic on the internet backbone to be patched. We all have to be more careful, but with a huge security hole like this, I'm not sure what more can be done at this point. You applied the patch to your pc, but your ISP/network provider has not, leaving you vulnerable to attack. Microsoft has made the problem worse. By releasing the patch, hackers can now reverse engineer it and figure out how to take advantage of Microsoft's software flaw before all the servers are properly patched. 100% of the servers should have been quietly patched first, before releasing/publicly acknowledging the flaw. I applied the patch, but it shows that I am still vulnerable.
So hackers could remap the DNS system... whitelisting and using just the numerical internet addresses still should be secure, no? I have always assumed that the numerical addresses aren't going through the DNS process... it just converts names to numbers, right? I think that IB can provide the numerical addresses that you need to hit their servers.
If you are going to a secure site (such as on-line banking), be sure to check that the URL shown in the browser starts with https:// Then check the site's X.509 security certificate. Bogus sites will not be able to fake this, and browsers will generally alert you for suspicious certificates.