DDoS amplification attacks by Memcached

Boyan Peychev / / DDoS
DDoS amplification attack
DDoS amplification attack

What is DDoS amplification attack?

These attacks usually use the UDP protocol. It is a simple connectionless communication model with a minimum of protocol mechanism. This means that one of the sides in the communication can send large amount to the other without restrictions. Without any confirmation and it doesn’t matter if the second side receive the data.

Due to the way the UDP protocol works, cyber-criminals use it to generate DDoS amplification attacks. The attacker sends a small UDP request with a spoofed IP address of the victim to public services.

The UDP protocol doesn’t require a connection verification between the parties. This is why the public services reply with the requested data to the IP address of the victim. As bigger is the data returned by exploited public service, bigger is the DDoS amplification factor.

In the past few years, hackers have exploited many public DNS resolvers and NTP servers to generate massive DDoS attacks against popular websites and services. Continue reading “DDoS amplification attacks by Memcached”

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What is Traffic Director?

Martin Pramatarov / / Load balancing

Traffic director is a way to optimize and manage the traffic going to your domain by using geographical-based routing. Like this, your clients from Asia will get connected to your Asian servers; your European clients will connect to the closest servers they have in Europe and so on.
Traffic Director is a cloud-based implementation of Load Balancing (you can check our article on Load Balancing). It helps to improve the performance of your network. It can be incredibly useful for medium and large companies that need to deliver content to different parts of the world.

Some companies call this service traffic director, others global traffic director or GeoDNS director, but it is best known as GeoDNS, and that is why we use this term as the name of our service.

Traffic Director

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 How to transfer your domain name?

Martin Pramatarov / / Domain names

Transferring your domain name is a straightforward procedure. People do it for different reasons: some are not happy with their current domain register’s service, others were unpleasantly surprised by a price increase, and they decided to move to another.

Transfer Domain

Why should you move your domain name to ClouDNS

One year FREE – We offer you a one-year extension for free! You can enjoy the extra period at no additional cost. This means, if your domain registration is expiring on 26.09.2018, now the new period will be 26.09.2019.

Risk-free transfer – If the process got interrupted, something happened that stopped you from transferring your domain, or you just quit, you will get your money back. You will not suffer any downtime during this time.

Free DNS account – You can use all features of our Free DNS and easily upgrade to some of our Premium plans.

Seamless transfer – Your domain name’s name servers are not altered anytime during the transfer process Hence your domain will not face ANY downtime during this process.

Continue reading ” How to transfer your domain name?”

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Why does DNS use UDP?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

There are various ways of sending data over IP – TCP, UDP, DCCP, SCTP, RSVP and more. We will focus our attention on the two that are most used – the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).

UDP

UDP and TCP

Both protocols are used to send packets of data over the internet. They do that on top of the IP protocol, which means that they direct the packets to IP addresses. They are treated very similar on their way from the users’ computers, through the routers and all the way to the end destination.

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Reverse DNS and PTR record

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

What is Reverse DNS?

You probably know already what is a forward DNS. It links the hostname/domain to the IP address. Now think from the opposite direction. Reverse DNS, also known as rDNS is doing the mirror action, using the IP address to find the hostname/domain. You might be surprised that this is actually needed, but it has significant application. It is very useful for e-mail verifications B2B and troubleshooting.

ReverseDNS

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What is Authoritative DNS server?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

The authoritative DNS server is the final holder of the IP of the domain you are looking for. When you write a domain name in your browser, a DNS query is sent to your internet service provider (ISP). The ISP has a recursive server, which might have the needed information cached in its memory. But if the data is outdated, this recursive server need to find the IP elsewhere. It will try to find it in other recursive servers, but if it can’t, it needs to get the IP address from an authoritative DNS server.

Authoritative DNS server

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What is an SSL certificate and do we need it?

Martin Pramatarov / / SSL Certificates

You have probably seen the “https” in most of the online shops like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba. Or maybe a green lock icon just before the domain’s name. These are clear signs that the website you are using is secure, it has an SSL certificate or a TLS one. You can safely browse it, use passwords and even pay with your credit card without the threat that someone will steal your data. The SSL certificate gives both protection and prestige to the websites using it.

HTTPS SSL certificate Secure connection internet certificate

What is an SSL Certificate?

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A case study of the top 50 e-commerce sites and their DNS

Metodi Chukovski / / DNS

The recent Black Friday we again saw the news for record-breaking revenues and profits. Over the past few years, the web has gotten faster, according to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site if it doesn’t load within three seconds. By this, you can guess that for a shopping site, the speed of the website reflects its revenue. So, we want to see whether e-commerce sites got faster as well?

The DDoS attacks are also increasing. According to Kaspersky Lab 33% of organizations experienced a DDoS attack in 2017, compared to 17% in 2016. So we also want to know if the top shopping websites are well prepared for future attacks.

In this article, we will check with our DNS tool all of the top 50 E-Commerce websites. We will see if their speed and DDoS protection is fine or they will need to improve. Based on our research we will make recommendations how these websites can improve.

ecommerce DNS Continue reading “A case study of the top 50 e-commerce sites and their DNS”

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DDoS attacks and how to protect ourselves

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

DDoS Attacks are widespread threats on the internet. With the continually increasing numbers of connected devices and new innovative ways of hacking them, we can’t just stay and wait to get affected. We should smartly implement our DNS infrastructure and choose a trusted DNS provider to be safe and to evade the downtime of our services.
But to be protected, we must know the danger.

DDoS attack

DDoS attack (denial-of-service attack). There are few different types, but in general, a DDoS attack is an attempt to overwhelm the target (a computer, few connected computers or a whole DNS network) with high traffic from multiple sources.

DDoS attack and information security expert

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What is backup DNS?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

DNS is the backbone of the internet. It connects all the users to the content they need. It is a constant exchange of information, but sometimes the DNS fails and this cause downtime. A blackout period that can be evaded by using a backup DNS.

Backup DNS

Backup DNS, also known as Secondary DNS or alternative DNS is a system of one or more DNS servers, who have a copy of the zone data (DNS records) of the Master (Primary) DNS server. It adds resilience, reduce the outage periods by answering requests even if the Master is down.

It is easy to set up, and it can save you tons of problems. If your Master DNS got damaged and lost the information, you would still have a copy in your Backup DNS.

backup DNS

 

What is the worst that can happen? Dyn DNS attack of 2016

Continue reading “What is backup DNS?”

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