Items tagged with DNS
Each year on April 1 we are a bit skeptical about some of the stuff we read because some of it isn’t real. Cloudflare, the same company that uses a wall of lava lamps to generate encryption keys, swears that its new 1.1.1.1 consumer DNS service is the real deal. The promise is that the new DNS service is the fastest on the web and is designed with privacy-first in mind. If you aren’t sure what DNS is, Cloudflare describes it this way, "DNS is the directory of the Internet. Whenever you click on a link, send an email, open a mobile app, often one of the first things that has to happen...
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If the internet was incredibly slow for you this morning when browsing certain websites, or if you were having trouble posting your “wakeup” tweet to Twitter, we now know the root cause. A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was carried out against Dyn, which provides DNS service to a number of big name sites including Amazon, Twitter, reddit, Spotify, The New York Times, and Airbnb (among others). The outages seemed to mainly be concentrated around the northeastern United States, with another “hot pocket” of activity centered in Texas. Dyn posted a note to its website earlier this...
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Was your high-speed Internet service acting wonky yesterday? Are you a Charter customer? If you answered 'yes' to both questions, you're not alone. It appears that Charter, the nation's fourth largest cable operator, suffered a widespread outage in broadband Internet service starting on late Saturday afternoon and continuing into the night. This editor happens to reside in southwest Michigan and was affected by the outage, as were residents of Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, and several other states. According to Charter spokeswoman Kim Haas, the service disruptions were "intermittent...
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If you're looking to get Google all sorts of fired up, here's a surefire way to do it: start screwing with its DNS servers. Turkey has been in the spotlight of late due to its anti-freedom of speech moves of late, starting with a nationwide blocking of Twitter followed by a similar approach to YouTube. Political shots are to blame, as you could probably guess, but many had turned to Google's own DNS servers in order to bypass the various blocks. Which was working great... for a time. Now, Google itself has published a blog saying the following: "We have received several credible reports and confirmed...
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Ownership of the Internet is about to undergo a massive change, as the U.S. is planning to cede sole control of Internet governance to the global private sector. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it will fulfill the mandate outlined back in the late 1990s that the agency would eventually phase out its administrative role over the DNS (Domain Name Server) and its interest in ICANN and place it in the hands of “global stakeholders”. “The timing is right to start the transition process,”...
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If you've had a difficult time connecting to select websites over the past few days, there's a very good chance that an on-going attack against spam-prevention agency Spamhaus is to blame. Spamhaus, based in London and Geneva, helps e-mail providers filter spam, and to do this, it manages a blocklist that includes any server verified to be used for the sole purpose of distributing unwanted content. You can see where this is going. Cyberbunker, a host that touts its willingness to host anything outside of child pornography and terrorism materials, recently found itself on Spamhaus' blocklist. It...
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As we reported on Tuesday, GoDaddy suffered a major outage that left thousands, and potentially millions of customers with downed websites and services. While a supposed member of the Anonymous collective took credit for an attack, GoDaddy has since concluded that no hack or distributed denial of service attack took place. Instead, the company has posted on its site that the cause of the issue was a router that somehow had its data tables corrupted. Many have remained skeptical about this claim, however, as for a single router being able to take out all of GoDaddy seems unlikely. All hosts have,...
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The Domain Name System, or DNS, is the address book of the Internet. Type in a site name such as www.amazon.com, and DNS servers "resolves" that name into an IP address, which is a set of numbers that can get you to the site. On Thursday, Google announced its own DNS service, called Google Public DNS, which it says is part of its initiative to "speed up the Internet."For most people, DNS is hidden. Routers, DSL and cable modems usually automatically set up the DNS servers used by your home network. You can change this, either by changing the settings on your router, or by changing it on each PC...
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If you’re looking to register a domain name, you might want to stay away from EstDomains. ICANN, the net’s authority over domain names is ready to pull the plug on this Estonia-based seller of domain names. Security experts have long accused EstDomains of being a refuge for cyber criminals for years. On Tuesday, ICANN told EstDomains that it was revoking its accreditation since it learned the company’s president had been convicted of online credit card fraud and money laundering in February. In a notice, ICANN said that it was freezing EstDomains' ability to register new domain names and looking...
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