Wednesday, October 10, 2018

ThousandEyes: Fortune 50 companies unprepared for DNS attack

A whopping 68 percent of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500 rankings are not adequately prepared for the next major attack on the DNS, according to the results of the 2018 ThousandEyes Global DNS Performance Report, which also found similar vulnerability among 44 percent of the top 25 SaaS providers, as well as 72% of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies.

Key findings of the 2018 ThousandEyes DNS Infrastructure Performance Report include:
Leading enterprises and SaaS providers remain needlessly vulnerable: DNS best practices are not widespread in major enterprises and SaaS providers, exposing them to severe risk and potentially making them vulnerable to the next attack such as Dyn experienced nearly two years ago.
Not every DNS infrastructure is created equal: DNS performance varies widely for public resolver providers and managed providers across regions and countries. Consideration for managed providers should be based on measured performance, rather than brand, or scope of global presence. 
Social and political systems create unpredictability: DNS performance variations correlate to countries known to interfere with Internet behavior, and controls over technology create risks for doing digital business in certain regions.


The 2018 ThousandEyes Global DNS Performance Report also provides an assessment of  DNS providers. Out of fifteen measured public DNS providers, newcomer Cloudflare was found to have overall fastest performance, followed by Google and OpenDNS, both of which improved over their performance in the 2017 ThousandEyes analysis. Top providers varied by region and country.

Performance highlights of the 2018 report include:

  • In the United States, Google was the top performer, followed by Cloudflare and OpenDNS. 
  • In the UK, Level 3 had the best performance, followed by Google and OpenDNS. 
  • In Japan, Cloudflare was the fastest performer, with Google in second and Neustar in third place. 

“Without DNS, there is no Internet. It's how users find a company’s apps, sites and services on the Internet. A DNS performance issue or attack can have a critical impact on customer experience, revenue, and brand reputation,” said Angelique Medina, senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes. “The ThousandEyes report highlights vital insights that can help organizations design a more effective DNS infrastructure — because even the most basic DNS decisions can determine how a company’s application or service, and ultimately how their overall brand, is perceived.” 

The full 2018 ThousandEyes DNS Performance Report is available here.
https://www.thousandeyes.com/global-dns-performance-report