The Romanian attack peak was recorded on December 6th, with 52,576,312. Overall, attacks from Romania are dominant, as we can see in the Attackers section
SaltStack, DNS and TLSA
Lately I blogged about how am I managing my DNS entries via SaltStack. So far it was about being a great time saver, but nothing that you couldn’t do manually with considerably more effort. This time, let’s take a look at something that would be in some setups almost impossible manually – adding TLSA records for your webs.
Sentinel View report – November 2023
Iran decreased its efforts, and for a change, most active attackers occupying all top three positions are from Romania. There is a new interesting IP that emerged last month, and that is an attacker from Panama. Small port scans for port 53 were at their record this month; we could not help but dig deeper. For more information: Sentinel View report – November 2023.
SaltStack, DNS and ssh
In my last post, I showed, how we can combine SaltStack and Knot to have some basic records filled in your zone. As I was introducing the concept, I picked the most obvious and basic entries. But since we have a hammer now, everything starts to look like a nail. And there is much more that can be stored in DNS apart from IP addresses. Let’s take a look at some other examples and how to get them automatically filled in by SaltStack.
Managing DNS via SaltStack
Running services online without domain is hard. More services you run, more DNS entries you need to manage. More services you run, more servers you need to manage. And when you manage several servers, it’s time to use some orchestration. But what about all those domains associated with those servers and services? Can’t that be also part of the orchestration? Somehow automated? Of course it can. Let me tell you how am I handling it for my domains and servers.
Orchestration via SaltStack
This post will be about my approach to something, that is almost obsolete. It is about orchestration. Back in the old days, people used to have a real computers or virtual machines and used to install and configure software. And also maintain it for years to come. I know that nowadays, you just create a bunch of pods, each one consisting from multiple containers you downloaded from DockerHub and whenever you need to reconfigure or update something, you just throw them away. Or even the whole datacenter. But I’m old and I still maintain individual systems with multiple services running. And jokes aside, when you do that, you want to have some automation to make it easier. That is what orchestration is for – to manage multiple machines from one central point and to make sure that everything is up to date and configured consistently.
Datacenter scale by XKCD
What has the new version of FRED brought and has yet to bring?
At the beginning of December 2023, we released a new version of FRED, the domain management system we developed for the operation of the Czech national domain, .CZ. and serving the same purpose in ten other countries. It is used to manage the domains of Argentina (.AR), Bosnia and Herzegovina (.BA), Costa Rica (.CR), Albania (.AL), North Macedonia (.MK), Tanzania (.TZ), Angola (.IT.AO and .CO.AO), Malawi (.MW), Lesotho (.LS) and Macau (.MO). The new version of FRED is pieced together from a multitude of incremental changes developed over the last 12+ months, which, with a few exceptions, we have continuously deployed into production in our country. A number of the modifications were interdependent in a significant way, so it was not possible to publish minor updates of the system because it would have been difficult for foreign registries to switch to them. FRED 2.48 is recommended as the version to upgrade to.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2024
Dear readers of our blog, thank you for your support and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you in 2024.
The CZ.NIC team
Knot Resolver 6.x News
In this post, I’d like to introduce the upcoming major version of Knot Resolver project, which is currently in the testing and debugging phase, and we would greatly appreciate if you could try it out and give us any feedback on it.
Sentinel View report – October 2023
An interesting dynamic is happening at the top of the attackers’ chart. First of all, Iranian attacks were overshadowed by other countries to the degree that we no longer see them in higher positions. To mention the current top four most significant, we would highlight Romania, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. There had been consistent attacks from Germany that came into prominence about the 4th of October and then slowly started to disappear on the 16th until the final dissolution on the 18th of October. The graph line for German attacks looks very stable and consistent. On the other hand, Romania’s malicious activity, which took the top of the charts, looked erratic and unorganized in the graph. To the degree that Sentinel View graphs in the Incidents section, except for Top countries by recorded incidents, are rendered almost useless.
