The threat of a DNS cache poisoning issue found by security researcher Dan Kaminsky scared the virtual pants off the technology industry, who responded well to the situation.

Although the details behind the DNS flaw were leaked ahead of Kaminsky’s talk at the Black Hat Conference, numerous nameservers around the Internet received a crucial fix even before the leak.

Getting those nameservers patched started for admins on July 9, when a number of major technology vendors jointly released a patch for the problem. Left unpatched, a vulnerable system could be tricked into sending people requesting a given domain name to a different domain.

That would be a conduit to stealing personal information and/or infecting the arriving visitor’s machine. Making the patch available required a significant effort, one that Kaminsky credited the industry with taking during his Black Hat talk.

“The industry rallied pretty ridiculously to do something about this, with hundreds of milllions protected,” Kaminsky noted in presentation slides he made available on his blog.