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Unwitting Collaborators, Part 11: DNS Poisoning and Domain Hijacking

  • Aug 30, 2002
What if you could fool the world into thinking that an organization's web site had been cracked, simply by redirecting Net users (invisibly) to a site that looked like the original, but defaced? The tactic is much easier than you may think.
Read the introduction to this article series.
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Introduction: The Real Threat of Disinformation Campaigns

In any war, the dissemination of propaganda and the use of disinformation are just as effective as the destruction or disruption of an enemy's infrastructure.

Disinformation campaigns, such as spreading false rumors electronically that are picked up by the media as true, cracking into news servers to plant false or misleading stories, or entering false or misleading information in databases, are tactics that can be used by cyberterrorists to undermine the effectiveness of organizations relying on that information.

One effective method to accomplish this spread of disinformation is DNS poisoning (also called DNS spoofing). This tactic consists of convincing a name server that a domain has a different IP address. A close cousin is domain hijacking, which involves stealing a domain at the registrar level.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020