On Wednesday 17th March, globally used DNS provider Network Solutions experienced the dreaded downtime we all hope to avoid. Starting at 4am Eastern time and continuing through to Thursday 18th with still no resolution, it’s affected thousands of people across the world. Network Solutions are the 4th biggest domain registrar in the world, with nearly 7 million users worldwide.

When the Domain Name System (DNS) was created in 1983 I imagine its creator Paul Mockapetris and his team had no idea that nearly 40 years later our interconnected world would be so reliant on the very simple, but critical, DNS network service. I have a love-hate relationship with DNS. I love all of the memes I see about how “It’s always DNS”, but I hate that it’s also true—I always forget to check that DNS is working correctly when troubleshooting network issues!

The vulnerability called SIGRed (CVE-2020-1350) has been around for 17 years, during which time it was present in Windows Server operating systems from version 2003 through 2019 and received a maximum severity rating of 10. It was finally patched in July 2020. As the vulnerability allows an attacker to perform remote code execution on Windows Server via DNS, it poses an extremely serious danger and can propagate over the network without user interaction.

Happy New Year! We want to kick off 2021 by announcing some improvements to DNS Check.

DNS is a critical component of your infrastructure, enabling your services to reach the endpoints they rely on and connecting your users to your web applications from anywhere in the world. In order to keep your DNS healthy and performant, you need complete visibility into both internal and external DNS resolution. Datadog is excited to announce new DNS monitoring features that help you troubleshoot DNS end-to-end, so you can ensure your applications’ performance and availability.

The most common problems and outages in a Kubernetes cluster come from coreDNS, so learning how to monitor coreDNS is crucial. Imagine that your frontend application suddenly goes down. After some time investigating, you discover it’s not resolving the backend endpoint because the DNS keeps returning 500 error codes. The sooner you can get to this conclusion, the faster you can recover your application.

In order to communicate, web pages, devices and applications need a common naming system which allows them to identify each other and send information. This is particularly important when the communication takes place over the Internet because of the large number of services and websites that need to be identified. This is why the Domain Name System (DNS) is so important for businesses. It matches website pages and devices to an IP address that can be traced by other devices.

Today’s Tip of the Day is the final of three focused on Domain Name System (DNS) monitoring. In the rest of the series, we looked at how digital experience monitoring (DEM) can (i) help ensure users are served by the correct DNS server to reduce latency and (ii) help to guard against DNS-related attacks. In today’s post, we talk about Anycast DNS, the advantages it provides, the challenges it presents in relation to troubleshooting DNS issues, and how to overcome them with Catchpoint.