How to Protect Yourself Against DNS Attacks When Using Cryptocurrency

How DNS Attacks Work
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s DNS attack, which affected a string of major websites and proved particularly costly to some Myetherwallet users, Cloudflare published a report. “BGP leaks and cryptocurrencies” examines how the attack went down, and how the attackers were able to exploit vulnerabilities in the DNS system. BGP is the Border Gateway Protocol, a standardized gateway for routing information from one part of the internet to another.
Anyone connecting to a DNS resolver that had been poisoned during the attack would have been rerouted to a fraudulent Russian provider instead.During the two hours leak the servers on the IP range only responded to queries for myetherwallet.com. As some people noticed SERVFAIL. Any DNS resolver that was asked for names handled by Route53 would ask the authoritative servers that had been taken over via the BGP leak. This poisoned DNS resolvers whose routers had accepted the route.
How to Detect DNS Attacks
The good news is that in most cases identifying the signs of BGP hijacking doesn’t call for a Master’s in internet protocol architecture. The first clue that something is amiss can be found by glancing at the https lock in your browser. It should be green, to denote that the certificate for the website you’re accessing is trusted. If it’s red or you’re presented with a warning message, don’t proceed just because the URL you’re loading is correct.
Stay Vigilant and Control your Crypto
Sites such as Whoismydns.com enable web users to check whether they recognize the name and IP of the server they’re connecting to, which will often be your ISP. Beyond that, unfortunately, there is little that the average web user can do, for the onus is on web admins to monitor their site for evidence of BGP leaks. Given the risks of storing cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges, and of interacting with websites such as Myetherwallet and decentralized exchanges like Etherdelta, both of which have fallen victim to DNS attacks, investors are left with few options. Crypto projects such as REMME are working on technology that will alert users to DNS attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges, but its implementation is still some way off.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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