Author: Karel Bříza

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February 2000: a fifteen-year-old took down Yahoo, eBay and Amazon

Michael Calce, known online as Mafiaboy, brought down the biggest sites on the web in a matter of days. On 7 February 2000 he launched a project he called Rivolta and pointed it at Yahoo, at the time the most visited site on the web. Yahoo was down for about an hour. Over the following days he added eBay, CNN, Dell, E*TRADE and Amazon. The interesting part is not that he was fifteen, although the case ended up being run by the FBI and commented on by the US president, and in September 2001 he was sentenced to eight months in open custody. The interesting part is how he did it. The traffic never came from his computer in Montreal. It came from roughly two hundred university networks he had taken control of, which meant there was no single source to block.

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Why a New DNS Record Shows Up in a Minute, or Sometimes in an Hour

You create a new DNS record, hit save, and nothing happens. The site is down, your monitoring reports an outage, ping says the name does not exist. Half an hour later everything suddenly works, even though you changed nothing. Where did that half hour come from when the record has a 5 minute TTL? The answer lies in one of the most commonly overlooked properties of DNS, and it is behind the vast majority of “why hasn’t my change propagated yet” questions. Let’s break it down from the beginning.

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Three layers, one certainty: How DNS, protection, and monitoring work together to keep your website afloat

A website outage does not begin with a blue screen. It begins much earlier: with poorly laid foundations. In this article, we will show you how three WEDOS services together form a complete defense system that also meets the requirements of the NIS2 directive. And all of it fully in Europe, under European jurisdiction.

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Your Own Server Without a Sysadmin? With Our VPS and ISPConfig, You Can Do It

We’ve updated the operating system lineup for our VPS SSD plans, and we want to show you that running your own server is no longer a job for tech wizards. If you can handle email, Excel, and the occasional router setup, you can click your way to your own server in minutes. And if you get stuck, an AI assistant (like ChatGPT) will guide you through it.

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