DNS Nightmare: CVE-2025-40778 and the Scariest Phishing Setup Yet

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IT SPARC Cast

John Barger

109 episodes

1 day ago

IT SPARC Cast is a digest of the Enterprise IT news over the last week, with insights, opinions, and a little sarcasm from 2 experts each with over 20 years of experience working in IT or for IT vendors.

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DNS Nightmare: CVE-2025-40778 and the Scariest Phishing Setup Yet

IT SPARC Cast

10 minutes 38 seconds

4 days ago

DNS Nightmare: CVE-2025-40778 and the Scariest Phishing Setup Yet

In this special Halloween edition of CVE of the Week, John and Lou dive into a truly chilling scenario — a high-severity DNS poisoning flaw that could be the perfect setup for a wave of phishing attacks and credential theft across enterprise networks.

The star of the episode: CVE-2025-40778, a newly discovered vulnerability in BIND 9’s resolver logic. This flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to inject forged DNS records, redirecting legitimate queries to malicious servers — all without user interaction. With a CVSS score of 8.6, exploits are already active in the wild, and over 5,900 exposed instances have been identified.

But that’s just the start. The hosts explain how major outages at AWS (US-East-1) and Microsoft Azure opened the door for clever phishers to strike when users were most vulnerable — during downtime. Together, these issues illustrate a perfect storm of technical failure and human manipulation.

Lou and John share practical defenses: patch immediately, enable DNSSEC, restrict recursion, and — most importantly — establish a trusted, redundant communication plan for your users before the next outage hits.

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Key Takeaways

•CVE-2025-40778 impacts BIND 9 versions from 9.11 to 9.21.12, including S1 previews.

•Exploits are already circulating — attackers can poison DNS caches remotely.

•Misconfigured DNS and phishing attacks can combine for devastating impact.

•Immediate action: patch, enable DNSSEC, monitor cache entries, and reduce TTLs.

•Prepare for outages — build redundant user communication channels to prevent panic and credential leaks.

Links

https://kb.isc.org/docs/cve-2025-40778

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-40778

https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/threatsday-bulletin-dns-poisoning-flaw.html

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/10/28/bind-9-vulnerability-cve-2025-40778-poc/

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Wrap-Up – Stay Connected

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