Considering how widespread the bug is, it could be rated on the same scale as Heartbleed and others and it could be more widespread than its predecessors. Kaminsky pointed out that the latest hole was coded into Gnu DNS libraries just months after he corrected other serious DNS flaws in 2008. Surprisingly the bug doesnt affect Android devices.

It has not yet been established that the code can be executed remotely nor has it been found to be exploited in the wild.

Redhat, which discovered the vulnerability along with Google, said that “a back of the envelope analysis shows that it should be possible to write correctly formed DNS responses with attacker controlled payloads that will penetrate a DNS cache hierarchy and therefore allow attackers to exploit machines behind such caches.”

Kaminsky says that the bug makes servers vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks right now, if hackers gain access to certain servers. Kaminsky calls a “solid critical vulnerability by any normal standard.” Now, the only question is whether things will get much worse.

Click here if you’re a DNS expert and don’t need to be told how DNS works.

Click here if your interests are around security policy implications and not the specific technical flaw in question.