Patch Notes #093 — The Day the DNS Died

Friday, someone turned off the internet’s phone book. A massive DDoS hit Dyn — the managed-DNS provider behind Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub — and for hours, half the household-name web wouldn’t resolve for much of the US. The weapon: MIRAI, a botnet of hacked IoT devices. Security cameras. DVRs. BABY MONITORS. Default passwords, internet-exposed, conscripted by the hundreds of thousands. The #049 prophecy (“IoT will keep this blog in material for a decade”) is ahead of schedule: the S in IoT stands for security, and the things we connected without thinking are now infrastructure-grade artillery pointed at whatever choke point volunteers.

The senior-engineer lesson isn’t the botnet, it’s the CHOKE POINT: dozens of “independent” services shared one DNS provider, so one attack was everyone’s outage. We spent Monday mapping our own hidden singletons — DNS, CDN, email, payments. Redundancy without diversity is bookkeeping. (I have a feeling I’ll be writing that sentence for the rest of my career.)

Also logged this window: Nintendo finally revealed the SWITCH — console-handheld hybrid, cartridge slot and all, March launch — and it looks either brilliant or doomed with no middle setting. And the F1 title fight is heading to the final rounds. Rosberg leads by 26 points; Hamilton awaits; teammate rivalry enters the climax, one champion leaves.

TIL: anycast DNS and why “just add a second provider” involves zone-transfer plumbing nobody rehearsed. We’re rehearsing it now. Friday was the fire drill.