April's Best Of DNS, Security, And Enterprise IT

We know that summer is approaching and the weather is getting warmer. Luckily, while you were away from the computer, we continued to scour the internet for the best DNS, security, and enterprise IT content from the last month. So, without further ado, here’s April best.

DNS

ICANN gTLDs: When Names Are Borrowed from an Atlas – When names are borrowed from an Atlas, things happen. Use of Geographic names have always caused some problems for two reasons; one they are in the public domain so anyone else can use them and two they connote that business is confined to just that geographic area. Like Paris Bakery, Waterloo Furniture or London Bank.
HTG Explains: What is DNS Cache Poisoning? – DNS cache poisoning, also known as DNS spoofing, is a type of attack that exploits vulnerabilities in the domain name system (DNS) to divert Internet traffic away from legitimate servers and towards fake ones.
Are You a Zombie? How to Check for Open DNS Resolvers – The recent Distributed Denial of Service attack against international spam-fighting group SpamHaus used a technique called DNS reflection to generate huge amounts of traffic for SpamHaus, overloading their servers.
DNS Summit in New York – On April 23, I met with leaders of ccTLDs, Registries, and Registrars in New York City for a milestone event that converged our work initiated during each of the CEO Roundtables hosted since the beginning of this year.
New Domains Are Coming! How To Protect Your Brand – If you’re at a start-up or already running a small business, your domain name is a key asset and your window to consumers and the rest of the world. Chances are you spent a few hours (at least) finding and registering a domain name that fits your goals and business strategy—likely in the .com space.
Watching Domains That Change DNS Servers Frequently – In the DNS, a domain only exists once it has been registered with the TLD (top-level domain) registry and the name servers to which it is assigned are operational. Logically, the entity that registers the pairing of domain to name server and the entity that operates a name server are distinct, although they are often the same.
Q&A: Paul Mockapetris, Inventor of the Domain Name System, Wants to Filter the Web – Before the Internet, there was the ARPANet, a closed computer network that pretty much shut down on weekends and over holidays. In 1983, Paul Mockapetris, then a computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, proposed opening up the network beyond academia to anyone with a computer and modem.
Update on ICANN’s New Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program – Despite numerous concerns voiced by governments, law enforcement, brand owners, and businesses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) continues to march forward with its new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program, which promises to significantly expand the number of available Internet domain extensions in the near future.

Security

“Largest ever DDoS” could have been stopped by ISPs, ENISA says – EU security agency says last month’s DDoS attack on Spamhaus could have been prevented if ISPs had followed existing traffic-filtering guidelines.
DDoS Power Up 718 Percent Amidst Widespread Batterings – The amount of bandwidth distributed denial of service (DDoS) attackers can generate is skyrocketing, jumping seven-fold quarter-over-quarter, a security company has warned.
Report: This Year, Spammers & Hackers will Target your Social Media & Smartphone Data – Spammers, hackers, and Internet malcontents are using a larger number of tools and systems to attack the public, according to Symantec. The Internet security firm yesterday released its annual Internet Security Threat Report, which, according to the company, shows that 2012 was one of the most active for hackers.
What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet – You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room.
How DDoS Attacks Threaten the Internet – Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have made lots of headlines in the past year. They’re the preferred method of attack used by hacktivist groups such as Anonymous. Since September, major American banks have become victims of multiple, repeated DDoS attacks.
Finding Patterns of Malicious Use in Bulk Registrations – Hi, this is Leigh Metcalf with my colleague Jonathan Spring. In 2011, .co.cc and .co.tv were removed from Google’s search results because of the high incidence of malicious domains.

Enterprise IT

Data Scientists — Weight Cost/Benefits of Cloud for Production Big Data Systems – Enterprise developers and data scientists often build small proofs-of-concept for Big Data analysis projects, involving relatively small subsets of enterprise data, on public cloud platforms. But when those pan out, the development team builds the production-level system in-house.
Are Data Center Humidity Levels Important? – Controlling the internal environment of a data center is always a top priority and heated discussion topic. There is no doubt that maintaining the proper environmental conditions within a data center is vital because it affects energy consumption, infrastructure costs and the lifespan of equipment.
ManageEngine Hones Enterprise Search for IT Admins – Anyone who’s been an IT administrator for a decade or more will tell you of the good old days when there was far too little information about the underlying IT configuration of a given enterprise. Now, the problem is too much information — which can be just as useless unless put into the right context.
If the Shoe Fits: Mobile Feeding Big Data – “It’s shocking we don’t see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise. In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.” –Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital

We’ll leave you this month with a video explanation of DNS. It also just happens to be a rap battle between two of our founding fathers.