An analysis of domain-name system (DNS) requests for 316 major sites across five industries shows a massive "step up" in traffic volume starting the last week of March — the time when many countries and states issued stay-at-home orders due to the pandemic — and continuing through April, according to Farsight Security, a provider of DNS intelligence.
The company, which collects anonymized DNS records and indexes the relationships in those resources, investigated the daily counts of the number of times a request generated a "miss" — that is, a request for the address of a domain, such as darkreading.com, was not present in the domain-name server's store of addresses. Farsight found that the level of misses grew by four to seven times at the end of March and the beginning of April, creating an increase in traffic volume.
Overall, the increase in traffic is somewhat of a mystery, says Paul Vixie, CEO of Farsight Security. A variety of scenarios could explain a rise in DNS traffic — such as misconfiguration or a change in behavior as people started working from home — but the most likely is a massive denial-of-service (DoS) attack, he says.
"We are not in the attribution business, but it looks like someone out there was interested in making some sites harder to reach," Vixie says.
The data shows a significant and unmistakable shift in what is happening on the Internet across five industries, including news, streaming services, travel and transportation, retail, and higher education. Media site Forbes, for example, had DNS queries that rose by more than ..
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