I was watching Call for Help (revisited) today and boy, was I in for a shock. Not only did they have Steve Gibson on the show, but he was going to share something that I have mixed feelings about disclosing to the masses. Now, I am not going to give out the exact how-to like Steve did, but I am going to discuss what he shared in a summary statement.

On international television, Mr. Gibson explained exactly how one can quite literally bring the Internet down to its knees (the DNS side of it, anyway) with little more than some understanding of how TTL works with DNS and caching DNS information. OK, I realize that many professionals out there might be thinking; “Duh Matt!” But for an otherwise uninformed script kiddie, this information could enable them to cause a lot of people real problems. I can actually picture some kid figuring out how to use the disclosed information to bring the DNS traffic going back and forth on the Internet to a screeching halt. Unless we know the actual IP addresses for every site ranging from our Gmail login page to our banking site, this could honestly spell trouble for the Web on a grand scale.

Now, having waved red flags to make everyone all paranoid, let me be clear on something: I completely understand that Steve Gibson did this in hopes of proving a point. He wants us to understand that this DNS issue needs to be fixed. But my problem with the whole segment about this DNS issue is that someone out there in the international audience might have the ability and now, thanks to this disclosed information, the step-by-step instructions to cause a worldwide DNS clog.

Once again, let me be crystal clear. I truly respect and value Steve’s abilities, skills, and even his wit. But when he publicly unleashed that information (I realize that this was taped some time ago), I can’t help but question the wisdom of his line of thinking, regardless of his intentions. Seriously folks, even Laporte looked nervously at the producers during the latter half of this segment. It just makes me stop and think: “Could he (Steve) not have provided a clear summary of the problem in lieu of full disclosure?” Maybe I am not being fair on this one, but it all seemed a little out of place to me personally.