Afilias Secures Millions of Internet Domains from BIND 9 Vulnerability with DNS Diversity Strategy

DUBLIN, IRELAND – July 30, 2009 – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that its DNS network, which supports approximately 10 percent of the Internet’s domain names, is secure from the recently announced BIND 9 vulnerability that could cause a denial of service (DoS) attack against DNS name servers. Afilias‘ network and customers are protected by its DNS diversity strategy, which avoids single points of failure like sole reliance on a single DNS resolution software such as BIND.

“Afilias has a fundamental security strategy in place across our DNS operations that integrates diversity at every layer of our infrastructure. Most critical to this strategy is ensuring diversity in DNS software,” said Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “An organization can build bigger hardware or expand its geographic footprint, but by running a single type DNS software, whether open source or proprietary, they will always be completely vulnerable to zero day exploits like the one revealed this week with BIND.”

Afilias’ DNS network runs both BIND and NSD, two popular, proven and open source DNS resolution software brands. Running both software products synchronously ensures that Afilias can simply remove one from production while it is patched or upgraded, ensuring seamless DNS resolution and 100 percent uptime. The same cannot be said of systems using a single flavor of software, whether open source or proprietary.

The BIND security vulnerability announced by ISC on July 28th, enables an attacker to send a specially crafted Dynamic Update request that can crash a DNS name server. All organizations running BIND 9 are required to upgrade their version to 9.4.3-P3, 9.5.1-P3 or 9.6.1-P1. Afilias has already upgraded its version of BIND.

“Afilias supports large scale domains like .INFO and .ORG as well as our Managed DNS business, and serves billions of queries daily. Our DNS diversity strategy ensures that our network was never in jeopardy, and that the 15 million domain names we are responsible for were always accessible online,” add Mohan.

Afilias has also published a new white paper entitled “5 Dimensions of Diversity: A Winning Strategy for Securing your DNS” which details its guidelines for how organizations can deploy diversity in their DNS networks to improve their security and reliability. The white paper can be downloaded at: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/162397/dns-diversity-whitepaper

About BIND

Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is the industry standard software for domain name resolution services. In active service for over 20 years, BIND has survived the rapid expansion of the Internet and become more widely deployed than any other DNS software. As open-source software, unlike proprietary solutions, its code has been scrutinized, tested and battle-hardened by hundreds or thousands of programmers over the years.

About Afilias

Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias’ reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services, Managed DNS, and services in the RFID and supply chain market with its Afilias Discovery Services. For more information on Afilias please visit www.afilias.info.