A recent survey by security appliance vendor (take with a grain of salt, they are the ones that provide the solution to the problem they have reported) indicates that 40% of the DNS servers run software that is outdated and very likely insecure and vulnerable to pharming attacks.

The Boulder, Colo.-based Measurement Factory, in querying some 17 percent of the roughly 7.5 million globally known authoritative DNS servers on the Internet, also found that in more than 40 percent of DNS servers, the software used to complete domain name resolution is out of date and likely insecure.

[Full survey]

Many online businesses are increasingly employing covert tactics to defend their rights online. Whether it is phishing, fraud-clicking, affiliate marketing, or commissions, the opportunities for abuse are abundant. One of the recent examples, Commission Junction, has contracted with Cyveillance to spider the web in search of affiliates that generate commissions without legitimately earning them - for example, cookie stuffing (send several cookies to user’s browser so that many retailers can "recognize" the affiliate referral, instead of only one), forced clicks (showing a pop-up as if the user had clicked on a link), among others.

Cyveillance’s strategies, however, have been decried as violating many Internet "good-faith" behavior protocols. For example, the company is alleged to abuse huge amounts of bandwidth of the spidered website, to ignore the "robots.txt" file, and (3) consort with the recording industry to prosecute individuals who share copyrighted music.

In response, Eric Olson, the VP of solution assurance at Cyveillance, says, "We try to maintain a light footprint, and we try not to overburden a server" during searches. He acknowledges that the company’s spider does look at pages that a site’s Robots.txt file labels as excluded. But, he adds, "We couldn’t do our jobs if we listened to every Web site saying, don’t look at these pages."

Eric Olson’s robots.txt claims have merit - they are 1) not required to "obey" robots.txt information and 2) they would be very ineffective if "bad guys" could protect themselves as easily as editing their robots.txt file. However, if the claims about Cyveillance being bandwidth-intensive, there may be claim against them for "trespass to chattels," a common law tort theory based on the premise that Cyveillance, by their heavy use of a server, prevent the rightful owner from full enjoyment of the server.

[Via InternetNews.com -]