Most businesses do not think about DNS monitoring until they experience an outage or a malicious attack at which point the damage to their operations and reputation is already underway.
Businesses protecting their online presence with DNS monitoring made three key moves:
DNS monitoring protects your online presence because it regularly checks your DNS records for any kind of changes that happens unexpectedly. It also localizes outages due to malicious attacks or human error.
Read this article to know about what is DNS, What is DNS monitoring, why DNS monitoring is important, How to Monitor the DNS Server?
A DNS server helps humans not remember the IP address to open internet sites. It works together with IP network protocol to give an easy to use and rich user experience.
DNS monitoring is monitoring to manage and ensure the security of communication between the browser users and the websites. The main advantage of DNS monitoring is to quickly diagnose any issue and prevent attacks. DNS monitoring consists of regularly checking DNS records for any sudden difference or localized outages. This data helps your team to identify the issue quickly and easily. It also helps in resolving any kind of issue that can make a negative impact on your website.
DNS monitoring is very important for the reliability of your website. Moreover, DNS monitoring ensures proper security and trust of the users. The reason behind the importance of DNS monitoring is 'the DNS is a favorite target for online hackers.' Therefore, it is important to monitor your website for any malicious attack. Here are the most common attacks:
DNS Poisoning - In this attack, the hacker enters their false information into your DNS cache. It can be used to reroute users to a spoofed variant of your website or grab their private information such, as name and credit card numbers.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks - In this attack, one or multiple systems attempt to crash a website because of excessive requests.
You can deploy a backup server so that when your hosting provider announces maintenance, you will be able to stay online by launching a backup server. Other than that, you can use Web monitoring services to monitor your website and inform you before any downtime. Moreover, you can display an appropriate error message on your website when it gets down. So always make sure you have the 503 error pages ready. This helps you to tell the users and search engines that your website is temporarily down and will be back online shortly. You can also ask the user to try again after some time. This will also help you to prevent the error pages from being indexed instead of the content of your website.
These are several things to monitor the DNS server:
IP Address - The IP address is used to display the content of a website, it is done by converting the website's domain name. It can help you to prevent attacks.
SOA Record - The SOA record of your website contains a serial number. This serial number is updated when any changes happen to your DNS. So you can prevent attacks by knowing the changes.
NS Records - You can monitor your nameserver records. It can catch any kind of tampering with your records.
MX and SRV Records - Monitoring your MX and SRV records helps you to prevent your email/communication from attacks.
Your Internet service provider assigns you to a DNS server when you sign up for them. This function helps you to access sites and services you want without typing the IP address of the particular website. Here you will learn the steps for how to change DNS for Windows 10. So before setting the DNS server on your Windows 10 operating system, you need to decide which DNS server you want to set on your Windows 10 operating system. To decide which DNS server you want to set, see the list of Free DNS servers: From here, you can choose your primary DNS server provider and secondary DNS server provider. So once you have decided which DNS server you want to choose, you need to follow the given steps:
Open Control Panel: Go to your computer's search bar, press "Start" and search for Control Panel.
Visit "Network and Internet": After opening the control panel, just click on "Network and Internet"
Click on Network and Sharing Centre: The next for how to change DNS for Windows 10 is to choose the option which says network and sharing canter, and then you will be able to see the interface given below in the picture.
Select "Change Adapter Settings": After opening the network and sharing canter, you will find the Change Adapter Settings option in the sidebar. Click on that.
Now open the Network Properties: Once you click on the Change adapter Settings, Right-Click on the current network you are using. You will find this option under your Wi-Fi or ethernet adapter. After the right-click, you will find "Properties" at the bottom of the context menu. Click on that.
Open IPv4 properties: In-network properties you should find "Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)". Choose that, then click "Properties" under the selection window.
Configure the DNS settings: The last step for how to change DNS for Windows 10 is to configure the DNS settings. In the 'general' tab, you will get “Use the following DNS server addresses.” Now you need to fill in the DNS address you have decided on.
Here we are using Cloudflare. Therefore, the preferred DNS is 1. 1. 1. 1. and the alternate DNS server is 1. 0. 0. 1. After filling in the DNS server numbers, click on Ok. And you're done!
When you type anything in your URL bar, DNS automatically takes you to the website you want. You don't have to type the whole IP address of the website. Your browser will fetch websites for you faster, and your latency will be lower if this process happens quickly. You will be able to go to the pages you want faster if your computer has the best DNS server of your area. For example, if you have the Yandex DNS, which is Russia based DNS, you will get poor performance in the United States of America. It depends on where you are. ### Conclusion- DNS monitoring is an important part of your online business. The users and your website are not safe from attacks without DNS monitoring. It can occur unwanted downtime, unhappy users, and bad brand value.
