March was a worrying month for Dan Kaminsky. The security researcher suddenly realised the internet was inherently broken. It wasn’t just slightly wonky, or coming loose at the hinges. The underlying design was kaput and if he didn’t get it fixed quickly and quietly, no one would be able to rely on it any more.The problem lay in the way the domain name service (DNS) worked. Web addresses such as www.ft.com make the internet easier for human beings to use, but computers don’t understand them. A computer needs an IP address, which is a series of numbers, rather than letters.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ceae4e0-91bb-11dd-b5cd-0000779fd18c.html