Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On 20 August, Google Threat Intelligence published an analysis of a phishing cluster it tracks as UNC7005. Google assesses with moderate confidence that the cluster is connected to ICE RELIC, the Russian actor formerly tracked as APT29 and also known as Midnight Blizzard.

CSC's CISO Outlook 2026 report surveyed 300 senior technology and cybersecurity executives in the first quarter of 2026, split evenly across North America, Europe and the UK, and Asia-Pacific. When asked which cyber threats they had actually experienced in 2025, not which ones worried them but which ones happened, the answer at the top of the list was domain and DNS hijacking, and subdomain takeover. Ahead of ransomware. Ahead of malware.

See how DNS turns a domain name into an IP address step by step, and why fast resolution keeps your pages loading quickly for users all around the world.

DNS Check watches its own infrastructure with several layers of monitoring, including DNS Check itself and third-party uptime monitoring services. One of those vendors polls a private health endpoint on our servers every five minutes, from probes around the world. That endpoint runs a set of internal checks (disk space, mail delivery, background job queues, DNS resolvers, and more) and returns an error if any of them fail. If it errors or stops responding, the vendor alerts us.

DNS monitoring asks your name servers the same question on a timer and checks the answer that comes back. Most teams aim it at their public domain and stop there. That covers half the problem. Your public domain and your internal resolver fail in different ways. A check from outside the building never sees the second one. In this blog, you'll see: By the end you'll know which half of your DNS nobody is watching. A DNS check sends a query and reads the reply. The reply can fail three ways.

In February, Let’s Encrypt announced that DNS-PERSIST-01 was coming, “some time in Q2 2026.” It’s October, and it’s nowhere close to ready. We’ve been waiting for DNS-PERSIST-01 since January, along with every other ACME client and lots of organizations. DNS-PERSIST-01 promised to simplify domain validation and make automation easier, but we had to wait on Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is waiting on a redesign, a standards body, and maybe one more vote.

DNS Check can now send a signed HTTPS request to any URL you choose whenever a monitored DNS record starts failing or starts passing again. If you've ever copied the details out of a DNS Check alert email into a ticket or a script, a webhook can do that step for you.

Why does every page, login and business application hesitate before anything loads, even when bandwidth graphs look healthy? That pause usually comes from name resolution: no connection starts until its hostname has been translated into an IP address, and whatever time that translation takes is added to the request. Slow DNS seldom shows up as a clear error.

On August 27, Google sent us an email. We did not. We barely recognized the hostname. None of us had thought about dev-docs.trackjs.com in about ten years.