I am sure most of you are wondering how a professional chef comes to a technology company. Really, it is the same reason many of work here or any company: opportunity.

I am trained within all aspects of food.

I have worked in every type of restaurant and with all types of cuisines, including four star resorts, country clubs and trendy cuisines. Recently, I was the Executive Chef for XO on Elm in Manchester, which I helped design and open. I was educated at The Culinary Institute of America and trained in Switzerland under one of Europe’s top chefs. I have extensive knowledge on healthy styles of cuisines, gluten free and vegan foods, as well as baking and pastry.

I have done basically every job in the cooking field, have worked under extreme circumstances and unusual situations and have performed the impossible too many times to count. Being a professional chef is an amazing career and one I am thankful that I have chosen.

But truthfully, it comes with a lot of sacrifice: 70 to 80 hour work weeks, physically demanding situations, working when you’re sick or hurt no matter what. In fact, I haven’t had an actual day off (besides Sundays) in almost two years.

As a chef, you work every holiday and miss most of your family events (unless they’re held at your restaurant) and it’s almost impossible to enjoy a balanced quality of life or live a healthy lifestyle.

I have always wanted to find a place where I could give my heart and soul, but still have somewhat of a normal life.

So when Jeremy Hitchock approached me about an idea they had for a personal corporate chef for their employees, I was intrigued. It amazed me that a company in this day and age was so focused on their culture and their employees. It made me realize that I could focus my background and experiences on one company and still have a life at the end of the day.

I have always loved teaching people about food, giving out my knowledge and just making people smile. I am grateful to have this kind of opportunity and to be a part of a company like Dyn.

I have to be honest that I felt like a fish out of water coming to a technology company, seeing as I’m not too tech savvy and still type with one finger. It is strange for me to show up everyday and not have a kitchen to cook in or to sit at a desk in front of a computer. I’m not the type of person who can sit still very long. I am used to doing 50 things at once.

Although Dyn has made me feel welcome from the start and the enthusiasm from everyone on this project has been great, I can’t wait to make everyone here feel at home in the our upcoming employee café and the kitchen there. I hope everyone feels like it’s a live version of the Food Network and is able to get so much from it and out of it.

My goal at Dyn is to be able to offer a more personalized dining experience for all, with the type of quality you see in a fine dining restaurant. 

I also would like to be able to offer some type of forum where any question can be asked on cooking, from recipes to cooking ideas and methods. Eventually, I would like to be able to offer free cooking classes for employees and personalized catering for employee personal events and specialized meals and food benefits to the employees of the month.

Does your company have its own cafe? If so, what do you like and not like?

But as the second day of the summit rolled around, I found myself sitting in my room between meetings catching up on email. I was no longer thinking about the summit’s worth. Something else was on my mind.

I realized that at Dyn, we are very good at providing world class DNS and Email Delivery as bookends of the AdMedia/ecommerce/Web 2.0/SaaS enterprise spectrum.  On the left side of this spectrum, you have the startups or small Enterprise clients that have a great idea, expertise and some money. They are working every day to move to the right where you’ll find the web enterprises of the world like our clients Zappos, Twitter, Netflix, Pandora and more.

Dyn has an appealing product that has both groups knocking on our door and we’ve been lucky enough to help a lot of our clients as they move along the spectrum (think Twitter becoming a client before it was a household name). Understandably, these two groups get a lot of our attention because as salespeople, our job is to discover and sign the next big thing or snag one of the more established brands from a worthy competitor.

But my mindset is changing.

After talking to as many people as I could in the two days we were in New Orleans, I realized there is a huge chunk in the middle that we’re not fully appreciating. Are we going after the waste services industry, agriculture, small town newspapers and university systems?  We even met with a company (which was my personal favorite) that supplies grocery stores with store brand fruits and vegetables.

This middle sector of not-so-web-based businesses often flies under the radar in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) world. Yet, they have an average gross revenue in the $50-$100 million range.  After talking to us and listening to Cory’s electrifying DNS/Email 101 speech, they essentially had the same response: “Thank you for enlightening me as to why DNS and email delivery are important in my business life and that what I’m doing now can be a lot better.”

Wow.

Let’s go back to the aforementioned fruits and vegetable company, which we’ll call Company X.  They provide 80 percent of store brand canned fruit and vegetable products in the U.S. or as their leader told us, “If you’ve eaten a canned tomato product in America, you’ve eaten ours.” A company this established and this successful must have an enterprise class DNS/email delivery provider?  No, they don’t.

So now, I’m on a mission to find the other 10,000 “Company X’s” of the world that need us but just don’t know it yet.

Maybe our focus is often on the bookends of the world, but just because you’re a multi-unit credit union or a regional health management consultant or your life is all about tomatoes (God bless ketchup), it doesn’t mean you don’t need us and deserve our attention. We’re here and ready to help because dammit, those companies deserve a world-class IaaS partner too.

If you’ve been a DynECT Managed DNS client the past few years, you may have noticed that your advanced services have changed in the way they are packaged and listed. This is done so that all of the functionality available within our portal is condensed in a more logical and easy to digest format.

For example, what used to be called Round Robin Load Balancing is simply Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) with every IP address in the global pool as it didn’t make sense for these two services to be shown differently within the portal. Also, Geo Traffic Management and Real Time Traffic Management (RTTM) are now sold in a single package so they are now represented that way in our managed portal.

This logical setup has a bit of a trickle down effect on our API access. Traffic Management now includes the formerly separate Load Balancing, CDN Manager and DTM Traffic Manager services, yet all three services still have separate API documentation. This is done because currently running services, enabled prior to the new service architecture, are still accessed by them.

A screen shot of the DynECT Managed DNS portal

However, once on the new service architecture, all three API calls are no longer needed. When using the new services, the only API calls you need are the GSLB calls below if you have enabled Traffic Management. (Note that you need to be logged in to DynECT Managed DNS to access.)

• GSLB
• GSLBRegion
• GSLBRegionPoolEntry

The Active Failover advanced feature, which allows for the automatic switch to a second IP address or CNAME, is essentially unchanged. In this case if you have Active Failover in use, these API calls are used to control your service:

• Failover

If you are running either Geo Traffic Management to direct users on a country-by-country basis to different sites or RTTM to automatically serve the lowest latency servers for a region, you use their similarly named APIs:

Geo:

• Geo
• GeoRegionGroup
• GeoNode

RTTM:

• RTTM
• RTTMRegion
• RTTMRegionPoolEntry

These are the only changes/tweaks in the API usage for the new services. How they are applied is exactly as before and if you would like to see some examples of this, check out our github repo and if you do anything cool with it or have questions, please let us know in the comments below or hit us up on Twitter!

NHPTV has been the Granite State’s only statewide locally owned and operated TV network for over 50 years, offering award-winning, locally focused programs and the best of PBS for television and online viewing. NHPTV has always been focused on community, education and enriching the lives of all people.

Mikel and Kelly model during the auction.

The spring auction was a live telethon dedicated to raising funds for the station — funds that typically go directly to “keeping the lights on.” Equipment, programming, events, utilities and the staff to keep those things managed are in most cases the bottom line reason for these types of public television fundraising events.

My wife Lisa and I find that we volunteer regularly. Usually, it is due to a need for leadership, representation or action for our local church, school board, NH Down Syndrome organizations or in our local community of Troy where we represent the Troy Recreation Committee and Samuel E. Paul War Memorial Park Commission.

Being a full time manager of a high-pace technology company, a dad of two boys under the age of two (one of which has Down Syndrome and has been in and out of Boston Children Hospital) and commuting three hours per day, one would safely assume I would have every right to say, “No, thank you.”

However in this instance and without hesitation, I said YES!

Was it because of my love for Sesame Street, Dinosaur Train, Word Girl, Charlie Rose or the PBS Business Hour? Not specifically, even though these are all wonderful programs that my children, wife, parents and grandparents enjoy. The real answer stems from my background and perspective on community and being a commanding and loving, intense and casual, big picture focused and task master Christian, husband, father, manager, son, grandson, and colleague of those I cherish and respect.

I have a television background. I cut my teeth in the entertainment business, performing, filming, editing, creating commercials, directing, technical directing and doing satellite broadcast engineering starting in the late 90s. I went all the way up to managing and engineering featured events like HBO Boxing, Showtime Boxing, UFC, PGA golf and various NBA, NHL and MLB events.

In a world of metrics and team missions to monitor, analyze and report viewership and commercial ratings. I cherish the idea that New Hampshire Public Television (PBS) cares about a different rating: public trust.

This is a concept that seems to have gone by the wayside over the past 25 years with most broadcasters. The very nature of how a modern broadcast entity survives is based on the idea of corporations buying commercial time and sponsorships to package around 18 minutes of specifically produced PG to M rated programs that include violence, sex and topics that I personally would be embarrassed to have on my television while hosting a gathering.

Mikel looks on while the auction is in full swing.

When people look for shows on statewide events, science, nature, community vendors or people, or even programs their children can watch, they turn first to public television. I firmly believe we would have a different America if public television did not exist. It is widely known (Google it) in the television arena that public television does an excellent job of mixing news and public affairs with a non-bias persuasion.

Rather than debasing life, public television has an ethical commitment to the community to provide thoughtful, intelligent, constructive, awareness or entertainment to the viewership. When you tune in to a PBS station like NHPTV, there is an expectation of a moral transaction between the station and you.

Many, including myself, have been fortunate to be inspired by Fred Rogers and Big Bird, Bob Ross and Ken Burns, Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley. One of my proudest moments every year (which I had the honor of broadcasting to all of America), was America’s Memorial Day and 4th of July Live Concerts, held on the lawn of the United States Capitol and produced by PBS.

I am honored and proud to have been asked by the leadership of this company to help represent Dyn, my family and the communities of this wonderful state to devote my time and energy to one of the greatest mediums — public television — in America today.

It is wonderful to know that our little start-up from Manchester, NH who has scaled tremendously still aspires to be directly engaged in the fabric of New Hampshire’s grassroots and feels a heavy responsibility to be involved with local communities, politics, companies and organizations much like New Hampshire Public Television.

My good friends, bosses and business partners CEO Jeremy Hitchcock and CTO Tom Daly were recently awarded the prestigious New Hampshire High Tech Council Entrepreneur of the Year award, recognizing leadership in the NH entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Both got to where they are by the tender age of ’round 30 because of two influential experiences that have continued to add to their still being written stories.

I’ve written about a lot of my personal tales on this blog. But following this amazing acknowledgment, I thought it was a good time to rehash Jeremy’s and Tom’s. They have no clue I’m doing this, so forgive me if I editorialize a bit.

Jeremy Hitchcock – CEO

Imagine being a young kid working on a semester long college internship project in which the results would determine the livelihood of the people making up the sample data.

When asked to do a report on the productivity of the workforce at a large financial services firm, Jeremy knew deep down what he was being asked. Do the analysis of the entire company, departments, teams and real people and put your results into a senior management dashboard.

A successful project for Jeremy and his peers meant loss of income and benefits for thousands and their families but only if the results were poor, he thought. It wasn’t so obvious right away (maybe that was a college student’s naive eyes) but shortly after Jeremy wrapped up the work, the company exercised massive layoffs.

The crazy part was Jeremy believed the data showed that the company was doing great, but the people at the top had other plans. Yes, this is the stereotypical corporate America company we compete against and from that day on, he vowed to never experience that again.

Still wonder why he became an entrepreneur that leads a culture globally recognized as a ‘work hard, play hard’ environment where the work/life balance discussion occurs in only gray areas? There you have it. Shortly after, Jeremy decided to make Dyn his full-time gig and the rest is history.

Tom Daly – CTO

Director of Corporate IT Erik Linstad told me this great story about Tom.

A few years Tom’s senior, Erik was working at a regional ISP in Manchester, NH, when an extremely boyish and shy looking 16-year-old started showing up each day with his oversized L.L. Bean backpack. Erik and his colleagues quietly quipped about the random kid who looked like he needed a babysitter. What made it ever more curious was that the kid didn’t have a license and would get dropped off each day by his mother after high school let out.

What happened next still makes Erik smile. The young whiz kid was a sponge, kept learning and growing and worked harder than anyone there. He practically wired the entire data center with his bare hands. Some of us play sports, act or play an instrument growing up. Tom built networks better than anyone else. Sound familiar? He dedicated his life to making the Internet a better performing playground for all of us.

Even better, our VP of Worldwide Sales Josh Delisle worked there too as he thought it was a “marketing communications” company when he applied (smooth)! Years later when the still boyish looking Tom had become a world recognized Internet routing expert, he called to see if Josh and Erik would join his growing company. Because he had earned so much respect with them both, they dove in with both feet.

More seasoned, but still the same boy genius, it’s no surprise how successful Tom has become and how much our customers love our products.

Sometimes, I don’t see eye to eye with these guys on random topics.

I know it’s a mutual feeling. We still will get annoyed at one another, but that’s true with every company and Dyn’s no different. But I bite my lip, take the high road, stay loyal, double down and keep hustling mainly because of the two stories above.

We’re all who we are and in the careers we’re in because of life experiences. These two stories inspire 150 people every day and thousands upon thousands of clients who leverage Dyn services. People buy from people they like and stick with companies that stay true to their roots. As the person directly responsible for our continued growth and global brand, I couldn’t be prouder of this acknowledgement for Jeremy and Tom.

Congrats friends, you deserve it. It’s an honor to be on this wild ride with you. Go big or go home.

The first few times I was confronted with this question, I didn’t think much of it and simply broke into my standard explanation. The problem was that it kept happening as it seems IaaS (pronounced eye-ass) isn’t as well known as we thought. Fair enough, so let’s dig into this whole “as-a-service” phenomenon.

Thanks to a series of TV commercials by our friends at Microsoft, many people, including my extraordinarily non-technical mother, knows of as-a-service’s other name, The Cloud.

And while the good folks in Redmond would like you to think this is a new thing, it has actually been around since the 1960′s. The company widely credited for bringing it to the modern day masses are our good friends and clients at Salesforce.

Salesforce provides the most well known version called software-as-a-service (SaaS). In a popularity contest, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) would probably come in a distant second with our favorite (IaaS) coming in third.

One of the major benefits of using an as-a-service provider is the elimination of expensive and labor intensive investments in bodies and/or hardware. Last year, we encouraged people to say goodbye to their hardware.

Going to the cloud also enables companies to stay focused on what they’re best at.

For example, we are in the process of implementing two SaaS offerings for billing (Zuora) and client services (Zendesk). We could have committed some of our very talented technical resources to building those systems instead, something we’ve done many times in the past. However, we ultimately determined that we needed those talented technical folks to stay focused on Managed DNS and Email Delivery.

Now it would really suck to have to use the above explanation every time we get asked what “infrastructure-as-a-service” means, so our marketing team was tasked with formulating a better plan.

Dyn has a storied history of running awareness campaigns for the spaces and industries in which we exist.  The best example was our DNS Is Sexy push with honorable mentions to Break Free, Tweet Nerdy To Me (which I’m not exactly sure why it wasn’t more successful) and Swim With The Sharks.  All the team needed to do with come up with another gem. Easy, right?

The issue was the idea we all kept coming back to — Get Some IaaS — had been shot down a year earlier. But time moves pretty quick at Dyn and plenty of bodies have been added since then, so we decided to re-pitch the idea to the powers that be. Having a few fresh voices helped and knowing some of the earlier reservations didn’t hurt either.  Add a little behind the scenes politicking and we were able to get it approved!

It was with great excitement that we officially kicked things off during SXSW — done in typical Dyn fashion with a pretty spectacular party.

I strongly encourage you to come Get Some IaaS if you’re in Las Vegas for Interop this week or if you’re at any of our events this year. If you still have questions about our favorite as-a-service, we’d be happy to help explain further!

This doesn’t apply only for full-time employees, but our interns as well. By recruiting star interns, we’ve been able to develop them into amazing talent who work here full-time.

In the five years I’ve been here, interns have played a big role in our success: a reason why we had our first ever Intern Day in March where we brought in 40 potential interns from colleges like WPI, SNHU, Northeastern, UNH Durham, UNH Manchester, Saint Anselm, Boston University and even a couple of folks up from Duke.

The day was not only an opportunity for us to get to know them but for them to see what we’re all about. Kicking it off with a pizza lunch, we introduced them to 17 project mentors so they could think about what would best suit them. It was a way for them to understand the passion we have for what we do. We had opportunities across the board from marketing, accounting, finance, engineering, IT and more. After hearing from the mentors, they were able to sign up for interviews there on the spot.

Some Dyners at a recent company bowling event.

To say that we were impressed with the talent that showed up that day would be an understatement.

We were left with some difficult decisions to make — the sign of a successful day. We weren’t alone in that assessment as we asked those who showed up to rate the experience, “How likely are you to recommend our Intern Day to a friend?” The average response was a 9.63 out of 10, so it looks like we’ll be doing this again next year!

For this summer, we plan on having 30 interns working at our Manchester headquarters but our job isn’t over the day they show up for work. Juliane Theriault did an amazing job of getting them in the door and will be working as the Intern Coordinator this summer, hosting special events that encourage them to bond together.

We want them to feel part of Dyn as well, so they’ll be joining the rest of us during our company lunches and meetings. This ensures that they not only learn from their time here, but that we learn from them as well. There’s no telling what amazing discovery will happen when they ask,“Why do we do this like this?”

One reason our interns are so important to us is that we don’t stick them in the corner doing menial work. They work with cutting-edge technology and solve real problems. We’ve had many interns take the opportunity and turn it into a full-time position. Those who haven’t? We still keep in touch with them and have a solid relationship with them all.

Dyn started in a college dorm room and as we grow, we never want to lose our roots.

We’re successful and continue to grow because our people continue to grow and be successful. Internships are not only a way to give back, but a way for us to ensure a bright future.

Often ignored, but still a major part of the DNS system, is the recursive DNS infrastructure, traditionally deployed by ISPs to serve their customers.

One way to think of the two pieces of the DNS is that the authoritative DNS (ADNS) is the Internet telephone book (a directory of DNS hostnames mapping to IP addresses) and the recursive DNS (RDNS) is like directory assistance, helping you look up an entry in the authoritative DNS.

There are tons of recursive DNS servers all over the world. In fact, on April 1st, 2012, Dyn’s IP anycast network communicated with nearly 3.2MM unique recursive DNS servers around the world. Every ISP in the world runs them for their customers. Enterprises need to run them to support their internal networks and there are third-party DNS options such as Internet Guide running all over the world.

These RDNS servers bridge the gap between the stub resolver software running on your Windows, Mac or Linux box, as well as the authoritative DNS servers, by traversing through the DNS from the root to the specific hostname being requested.

A single request from a stub resolver can translate to tons of DNS requests being made by the upstream recursive as the delegation of a domain is chased and the performance of the query’s corresponding ADNS servers can drastically affect the delay in the answer from getting through.

Some RDNS servers (approximately 80% of them) employ an optimization known as “round trip time (RTT) banding”. To explain, the RTT of a DNS query is the measurement of the delay between a DNS query being issued and the time the answer is received.

RDNS servers use this technique to determine which ADNS servers for a domain are the fastest responding, so that once an RDNS has queried all of the ADNS servers for a domain at least once, they can return to the fastest responding server for subsequent queries. It’s why using a fast IP anycast DNS network is so important as delays in populating the RTT table due to slow unicast ADNS servers can cause performance issues.

Lame & Sideways Delegations

Lame delegations can also cause significant delays in DNS resolution times for the end user, which affects their user experience. A lame delegation is a nameserver that doesn’t answer authoritatively for the domain in question or doesn’t answer DNS queries at all. The DNS timeouts in many RDNS implementations can be set between two and ten seconds, creating delay for your customers while RTT banding tries to do its job.

Here’s an example of a domain with a lame delegation:

Delegation at .com:
example.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.example.com
example.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.example.com
example.com. 172800 IN NS internal-ns.example.com

In this case, we’ll assume that ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com are the external nameservers for example.com and internal-ns.example.com is some kind of internal DNS server (not on the Internet) that got included in the delegation. When a RDNS is priming its RTT table (as described above), a query to internal-ns.example.com will timeout (2 – 10 seconds), delaying the response to a stub client waiting on a request. What a huge hit to performance!

Another DNS faux pas that can greatly affect performance is a sideways delegation, a situation where the NS records at the parent zone (i.e. .com) don’t match the NS records located at the apex of the zone in question (i.e. foo.com). This creates a situation where a RDNS can be confused about where to locate the authoritative data for the zone and the behavior of the DNS is actually undocumented in this situation.

In practice of working with customers, the resultant behavior has often been inconsistently performing DNS operations with even small intermittent outages occurring.

Here’s an example of a sideways delegation:

Delegation at .com:
example.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.example.com
example.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.example.com

NS records retrieved from ns1.example.com
example.com. 172800 IN NS nsa.example.com
example.com. 172800 IN NS nsb.example.com

It’s these types of sharp, pointy, edgy details of the DNS that illustrate the need for DNS operations to be left to the experts. We’re constantly on the lookout for lame delegations, sideways delegations or any issues that could affect the availability of our ADNS servers, which in turn, translate to fast, speedy responses for the RDNS servers used by our clients’ customers around the world.

With RTT banding, it’s why having consistent performing anycast DNS is so important on a worldwide scale. Don’t let these types of issues cause your domain latency or downtime!

With that certain undeniable conviction, we entered the Email Evolution Conference’s networking event put on by Message Systems this past March.

“Follow my lead.”

These words rang true for Marketing Manager Josh Nason as he attended his first conference repping the Dyn brand. Director of Email Mike Veilleux was also outside the friendly confines of 150 Dow Street with VP of Worldwide Sales Josh Delisle and myself for the very first time. It was time to hustle and pull the value and ROI we needed out of the show.

Back in the day when the sales & marketing team was small, it was easier to ensure our efforts were integrated so we could make the most out of each show. With scaling, this has been one of my many challenges. It’s still entirely my responsibility, but not being in the flesh everywhere, I realize the need to better train and mentor our Dyn street team. There are few things I take more seriously than ensuring all of our staff genuinely embodies our brand.

With over 70 shows on the docket for 2012 and a dozen or so new employees traveling for Dyn for the first time, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a summary of why events are such a huge part of our strategy. Outside of our people, travel and entertainment is the largest piece of the budget I maintain, so I’m a psycho when it comes to making serious noise and turning these disruptive efforts into both short term and long term revenue.

We categorize our event attendance four ways:

• Feet on the ground: You’re attending the show to hustle. This includes setting up meetings, wearing the latest Dyn t-shirts, handing out collateral and swag, walking the expo floor, snagging business cards, attending sessions & keynotes, making noise and perhaps even hosting an impromptu DynTini event. All events are an excuse to be in town, so we pack the schedule with meetings. “You can’t teach hustle,” Delisle always says.
• Speaking gigs: We’re at the show to lead a session or to give a keynote presentation with one goal: build awareness for our technology, our products and our brand. These slots are not easy to attain, so we must capitalize by being engaging, energetic, compelling and memorable. We must give the audience a reason to want to stay in touch and align with all that we do.
• Exhibiting & events: Of the 70 shows on our world tour, we only exhibit or throw an event at about five of them per year with Interop Las Vegas & NY, Velocity Santa Clara & EU and SXSW leading the pack. These are our biggest ticket items of the calendar year and our “we have arrived” shows. There is nothing more legitimizing next to our public competition than an undeniable presence where our clients and prospects aggregate. There is pride shared across the board.
• Sponsoring: Sometimes we’ll want to get our name or current campaign out there in the big, bright lights. You probably have seen some Dyn lanyards or t’s, witnessed a birds of a feather session, attended a DynTini, listened to Dyn sponsored jam sessions, seen our swag in your bag or witnessed our logo on all the signage. It might even be how you learned about “DNS is Sexy” or “Break Free.” We use very selective sponsorships to display our strong commitment to the show and for the attendees to get more and more familiar with the black and gold.

Our bootstrapped legacy leads us to think differently about how we grow. Events have and will always be a way for us to be disruptive and stand out from the crowd. No one attacks them quite like Dyn. Just ask our competition. I’m pretty sure they’ll admit we’re a little nuts.

Whether you are in sales, marketing, engineering, client services, network operations or business operations, you are an advocate for the Dyn brand so wearing our gear and repping our name with the swagger we’ve instilled is an absolute must.

“Let’s hit it. Follow my lead.”

To find us and join in on the hustle, follow us on Twitter or check out our always growing event schedule with full details on what we’re doing and where.

So what happened?

This all began a while back when six Estonians launched malware called “DNSChanger.” Basically, what this did was change your directory assistance server from a good one to a bad one. Domain Name Servers (DNS) get you to where you want to go on the Internet, even if you don’t realize you’re using them.

DNS is the Internet’s phone book. When you search for www.dyn.com, the DNS gets you to www.dyn.com, like when you call “Home” on your cell phone without having to dial 603-555-1234. However, this malware hijacked some computers’ DNS (technically their recursive DNS servers).

Most of the time those infected computers went to the right websites. But whenever the hackers wanted to, they could send you to a website of their choice, promoting fake and/or dangerous products. This is especially troubling when it comes to banking websites. You may think you’re going to your bank’s website but you’re instead going to a fake one that looks like your bank. As a result, you give access to your personal information to some very bad people.

How did they get caught?

This activity is obviously illegal and there is a profit motive that drives people to commit these crimes. The FBI claimed around four million computers were infected and millions of dollars were siphoned from people who used these computers and unknowingly gave their information. That’s a lot of money. So much money, in fact, that it was obvious to the FBI that something was wrong. As a result, they were able to arrest these Estonian hackers in a November raid called “Operation Ghost Click.” The problem was these computers were already infected.

Why is the FBI talking about shutting down a lot of computers?

They’re not trying to shut down any computers, but they are working to solve a problem by operating a very helpful service in which they are temporarily standing up good infrastructure in place of bad. However, that service will end this July 9 which means that you have several months to check and see if your computer is infected and if so, get it fixed. It is a quick and painless fix but we’ll get to that in a minute.

How can I prevent such attacks in the future?

To solve this problem, the FBI secured a court order last March that authorized the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) — a nonprofit corporation that makes software called BIND, which most of the Internet uses for resolving DNS names — to operate and maintain temporary “clean” DNS servers.  It is this service that will be shut down in July.

That gives everyone ample time to visit the FBI-promoted website to check if your computer has been infected. The website is translated into multiple languages. If it has been infected, there is spyware software right on that site that can fix the problem. If you do all of this, this particular malware will not affect your computer. If you don’t do it by July, then your DNS-related Internet activity (i.e. web and email) will stop functioning.

The response by different private and public organizations was very thorough, which should give you some comfort.

Takeaways

It really comes down to being cautious when you’re running software or clicking on links. Always be careful about email attachments. Do you know the sender? If not, don’t open it. Also on your computer, don’t run everything as an administrator. While it may be a little burdensome, create a guest account or separate user account to run things through. Also be cautious of flash drives. These are a common way of spreading a virus.

Computers give us access to the world. Unfortunately, they also make it possible for six people from Estonia (or anywhere else) to cause a lot of trouble. Like any tool, proper use is imperative. If you are cautious with your computer you will be less likely to run into these sorts of problems. If you have, there is plenty of time to get them fixed so just make sure you do so before July.