By now, on websites like the BBC News, you will probably have read stories about a serious security problem that was recently found in many of the DNS servers commonly used on the Internet.  Some of our customers have contacted our Support phone line asking for more information about Gradwell dot com’s response to this problem.

Gradwell dot com has been aware of this issue with DNS servers since early July, thanks to a story posted on the popular Linux.com website.  We immediately checked our DNS servers, and determined that our nameservers are not vulnerable to this attack, using the testing tools published by the security researcher who discovered this issue.

If you run your own nameserver at all, the current advice from security experts is to ensure that you have upgraded it to the very latest version available.  I personally use Linux Weekly News‘ excellent weekly security round-up page to keep track of all the reported security updates for the different Linux distributions; your Linux distribution of choice will also publish regular security advisories.

I hope this clarifies the situation for our customers.  If you do have any concerns that I have not addressed, or at any time believe you’ve spotted a security problem that we haven’t addressed, you can raise an incident with our Customer Services team in the usual way, or contact me directly as firstname.lastname@gradwell.net.

Best regards,
Stu
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Stuart Herbert, Technical Manager, Gradwell dot com Ltd