Multiple DNS providers, the Perfect Gift this Holiday Season
In October, the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on record rocked the Internet, taking down many major websites such as Twitter, Amazon, The New York Times, PayPal, and many others. Attributed to prominent hacker groups, the three attacks targeted websites operated by Dyn, a popular domain name system (DNS) provider that much of the Internet relies on to power websites. And while it may be easy to blame Dyn’s security measures or other weaknesses for the outages, the truth is that the October 21 attack wasn’t a problem specific to Dyn or any of the targeted websites.
Over the last decade or so, every major DNS provider has experienced DDoS attacks and periods of down time. These attacks are nearly inevitable—and yet most companies haven’t acknowledged that they’re likely to be attacked again, and they haven’t properly prepared or learned from previous experiences. DNS itself is not the root cause of the outages, though the way we rely on DNS providers is a contributing factor. Rather, the main problem is that we design systems that are not resilient.
One solution to preventing future DNS outages (especially important at peak holiday season) is for companies to incorporate redundancy into their server options. Establishing this as a default would help prevent websites from going down even when under attack and maintain continuous service for users.