WORLDTECHThis Week in Security: Critical DNS Keys Rotated, Hacking Freezers Isn’t Cool, OpenAI Spies On Itself, and Advanced Hardware Wallet Hacks
What happened
This is the second time the DNSSEC keys have rotated since the system was implemented, and the first time in 2018 didn’t exactly go entirely smoothly. The keys behind DNSSEC, the system for cryptographically validating DNS (the system that turns a domain name into an address) responses, rolled over on October 11 2026. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.
DNS is what resolves a host name and turns it into an IP address. It underpins web browsing, email, and just about every other connection.
It’s also a very early Internet protocol, written in both a simpler, less paranoid era, and an era where encryption (scrambling data so only the holder of the key can read it) was computationally expensive and legally problematic. DNS offers little protection against malicious actors spoofing responses, and the impacts range from phishing (messages that impersonate someone to obtain passwords or money) to redirecting email to just about any other manipulation of connections you can image.