Overview of The Domain Name System
A domain name system server translates a human readable domain name (such as example.com) into a numerical IP address that is used to route communications between nodes. Normally if the server doesn't know a requested translation offhand it will ask another server, and the process continues recursively.
When a DNS server has received a non-authentic translation and caches it for performance optimization, it is considered poisoned, and it supplies the non-authentic data to clients. If a DNS server is poisoned, it may return an incorrect IP address, diverting traffic to another computer (often an attacker's).
Read more about this topic: DNS Spoofing
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