In addition to the internal system security and protections a bank uses, external website monitoring aids in quickly recognizing and dealing with potential security threats. In many cases external monitoring provides the earliest warning and helps to pinpoint what is going wrong during a cyber attack.
If you bank with anyone larger than a local credit union, it’s likely your bank’s website has been attacked within the past few months as recent denial-of-service cyber attacks have increased in both frequency and severity. An April 2013 NBC News report found that in the six weeks prior, 15 of the nation’s largest banks were offline for a total of 249 hours due to denial of service cyber attacks.
Dotcom-Monitor has established a Native IPv6 Monitoring Bureau dedicated to effective end-to-end IPv6 website performance monitoring. Dotcom-Monitor tests for performance and accessibility and can also simulate real user activities such as validating text and images as well as portal logins and shopping cart functionality.
Dotcom-Monitor is tracking a Wells Fargo down website based on a consistent failure to connect host issues that began at approximately April 4, 12 PM CST. Dotcom-Monitor has been tracking a history of banking website outages for several months and has provided analysis of banking outages for the financial industry for issues involving recent PNC bank outages, U.S. Bancorp outages, and a previous Wells Fargo outages.
AT&T and GoDaddy’s Domain Name Server (DNS) outages impacted vast areas of the Internet when they hit in 2012, taking down millions of websites. Learn more about the DNS process and take steps to protect your website from potential DNS disasters in 2013.
Dotcom-Monitor uses a non-cache DNS monitoring solution with high frequency monitoring that propagates DNS queries to the root name servers. That means a DNS issue will be identified quickly, as opposed to being masked for days as it might be with a cached monitoring approach. When monitored properly, using a non-cache method, an error is quickly identified so the designated workaround, like a DNS failover, can be implemented.
Dotcom-Monitor non-cached DNS monitoring (unlike some other cache-based DNS monitoring solutions) also provides diagnostics with an automated trace-route as soon as a DNS problem is detected. This means less time investigating the problem and much faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The Dotcom-Monitor DNS monitoring solution also allows website owners to spot trends so that small DNS issues can be addressed before they become big DNS problems.
The only way to know how well or how reliably DNS servers perform is to make consistent, regular objective tests and measurements over time. While DNS servers can be verified manually, that is not a practical solution. Manually checking the DNS servers a few times a week, or even a few times a day, simply does not provide enough data to accurately judge performance, nor does it quickly alert website owners to problems. Automatic DNS monitoring gives website owners the information needed.
Monitoring Content Delivery Networks enables webmasters to regain control of delivery and deployment of CDN content. Monitoring tools that reach into element-level performance of web pages, such as BrowserView Monitoring at Dotcom-Monitor, enable webmasters to quantify returns and increase efficiency of Content Delivery Networks.
The big day came and you had the high ground, your website was great, you even had some good, cheap monitoring in place, but oops…it turns out that monitoring was a little too cheap. It turns out your “hey, this is cheap” website monitoring service cached the Domain Name Server (DNS) process. You had a DNS issue and you didn’t know it …but your customers did.
Hurricane Sandy hits New York City, power shut off in lower Manhattan, websites without redundant servers go down. According to several news reports, websites for the United Nations, Buzzfeed, Gawker, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Bloomberg news and Livestream went down. NYC-based Hosting and Internet Services Provider Datagram is among those affected.
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