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.

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.

Sentinel View report – September 2023

On the first pages of the Report, we can see that September numbers are very comparable to August data. Iran-based attackers moved away from top charts, and we see that addresses from the United States now take the lead in the HTTP minipot incidents records.

Sentinel View report – August 2023

Minipot attacks decreased by nearly a half from the preceding month in August. The subnet 46.148.40.0/24 members were not so active last month, and we can see addresses from other countries emerging at the top of the table. Notable mentions go to some European countries, namely Germany and Romania, who got back into the spotlight.

RFC 9432: DNS Catalog zones

A DNS zone is usually served by multiple authoritative servers, which is actually recommended for the sake of redundancy. Large authoritative DNS operators even combine different name server implementations to avoid complete infrastructure outage in case of any software error. For synchronizing zone contents between authoritative servers, a DNS-specific mechanism is available, called zone transfer. It is well established and supported by all common DNS implementations. It enables both full zone transfer (AXFR) and incremental update (IXFR).

 

Sentinel View report – May 2023

The overall count for total incidents dropped by 100 million. Sounds like a lot, but given the number of attacks we recorded (1.6 billion), it is just less than 10% decrease. Still significant, but not as shocking as hundred millions sounds. The results for minipot traps have not changed significantly from previous month, it seems the attackers are pretty consistent in regards to what services interest them the most.