NEWBURYPORT, Mass. -- DNSstuff.com, a global leader in DNS issues and tools with one of the largest communities of IT professionals on the Web, today issued a warning and called for greater preparedness as a result of the recent attack targeting root servers. This attack is the latest in a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks targeting DNS servers that began late last year. DNSstuff.com today also introduced a new root server time map tool designed to help IT professionals track the performance of and possible attacks on these servers.

“It is likely that this latest apparent probing effort was testing the resiliency of DNS,” explained Paul D. Parisi, CTO of DNSstuff.com. “This could be a harbinger of more targeted attacks against .com parent servers or even individual enterprise servers, neither of which may have the resiliency or redundancy of the systems attacked earlier this week. Either of these scenarios could have catastrophic consequences for the Internet-at-large or specific organizations.”

New Tool to Spot Attacks

The new DNSstuff.com root server time map allows IT professionals to monitor the state of root and .com servers supporting DNS. Now anyone can check real-time performance of these servers to spot long latency times or unusual behavior in response times. The root server time map can be found at http://www.dnsstuff.com/info/roottimes.htm.

Even without an increase in targeted or malicious attacks on DNS servers, many of those same servers remain vulnerable or are performing poorly because of simple human error. There are over 85 million domains on the Web, and a survey by DNSstuff.com of its users revealed that there are significant, fixable configuration issues with DNS settings for nearly 70% of those active domains. These incorrect settings can lead to site outages or improperly routed email, and a targeted attack exploiting these settings could lead to even more widespread network and Internet outages.

Simple Prevention Settings

“We are a robust web application and the Web’s acknowledged leader in helping IT professionals better manage their networks and DNS through expert advice, best practices and relevant resources,” continued Parisi. “Unfortunately, many people are relying on improperly configured DNS and are unintentionally leaving themselves, and therefore the web, vulnerable to attack. ”

DNSstuff.com