<story><title>What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2022/04/13/this-week-in-glean-what-flips-your-bit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IncRnd</author><text>&amp;quot;Bitsquatting is a form of cybersquatting which relies on bit-flip errors that occur during the process of making a DNS request. These bit-flips may occur due to factors such as faulty hardware or cosmic rays. When such an error occurs, the user requesting the domain may be directed to a website registered under a domain name similar to a legitimate domain, except with one bit flipped in their respective binary representations.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A 2011 Black Hat paper detailed an analysis where eight legitimate domains were targeted with thirty one bitsquat domains. Over the course of one day, 3,434 requests were made to bitsquat domains.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;Cisco presented a paper on bitsquatting at defcon, &amp;quot;Examining the Bitsquatting Attack Surface&amp;quot;. From the paper, &amp;quot;The conclusion is that the possibility of bitsquat attacks is more widespread than originally thought, but several techniques exist for mitigating the effects of these new attacks.&amp;quot; [2]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bitsquatting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bitsquatting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;media.defcon.org&amp;#x2F;DEF%20CON%2021&amp;#x2F;DEF%20CON%2021%20presentations&amp;#x2F;DEF%20CON%2021%20-%20Schultz-Examining-the-Bitsquatting-Attack-Surface-WP.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;media.defcon.org&amp;#x2F;DEF%20CON%2021&amp;#x2F;DEF%20CON%2021%20pre...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2022/04/13/this-week-in-glean-what-flips-your-bit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tconfrey</author><text>I worked at Sonus Networks (now Ribbon[0]) in the early 2000&amp;#x27;s building VoIP solutions for telcos. We had a bunch of unexplained errors in a new installation in Denver. After much head scratching the engineers on the problem concluded that the higher altitude significantly increased the likelihood of impact by alpha particles and that that was the cause of the problem!&lt;p&gt;(IIRC we increased the shielding on the devices.)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ribboncommunications.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ribboncommunications.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>