Inside Dyn Research: North Korea

Last week I published a blog that discussed the role Dyn has played in major international news stories. This week I’ve decided to pull back the curtain a bit and give you an in-depth look into how something like this goes down.

This past month you may have read in publications like Vice, NBC or Bloomberg about a Facebook clone operating out of North Korea. You may have also noticed that it was our research team that first discovered this. Finally, you probably asked: how did they see this and why does Dyn care about Kim Jong-un and social networks?

I can answer the latter question first. At Dyn we are passionate about the performance of the internet. We believe the internet is a tool with unlimited potential. What is fascinating though is that it is a flawed tool. The internet by its very nature is volatile. There are outages and threats happening every day. It is up to the companies who want to use this tool to understand this volatility and prepare for it. At Dyn we believe with the right Internet Performance Management strategy you can own the Internet.

But to do that you must know the issues. Continue reading

What A Turkish Coup Taught Me About The Media & The Power Of Internet Performance

As a former journalist, I find my role as Director of Corporate Comms at Dyn fascinating. Based on the fact that Dyn has a unique perspective of the internet and employs world-class data scientists, we frequently find ourselves at the center of news cycles – though it would be more accurate to call them storms because of the flurry of activity that happens in a short period of time.

There was no greater example of this than in December of 2014 when our own Doug Madory was the first person to discover that North Korea was offline. This was at the time of North Korea’s alleged hack of Sony, which was major international news. When Doug sent out his first tweet the media floodgates opened. I remember fielding calls from Japanese television stations.

This happened on a smaller scale when Iraq shut down the internet and when a Facebook clone went online in North Korea. However, the most recent event came just last week when the Turkish military staged an unsuccessful coup in Istanbul.

esrk / Shutterstock.com

While it is exciting to play a role in these breaking news situations and the exposure for Dyn is always good, the Continue reading

Owning The Internet Isn’t Cheating, Which Will Make The Iraqi Government Happy

Before students around the world can embrace summer vacation, they must first endure final exams. This time-tested tradition brings late night cram sessions, the regurgitation of facts and figures, nail biting and sweaty palms. For those who work hard, final exams can build character. And for those who started their summer break too early, there’s an easier option: cheating.

As the spouse of a teacher, I know cheating is a major concern in classrooms around the world. Teachers have a variety of tricks to prevent this including watching their students like hawks, giving out different tests, not allowing labeled bottled drinks or even requiring an ID before entering the room.

Of course, some countries take their prevention measures to the extreme. Iraq literally shut off the internet and Algeria blocked Twitter and Facebook. All of this in an effort to prevent cheating. Yikes!

This is a great reminder of a couple of things:

The internet is a tool. A tool is only as valuable as the hands it is in. It can be used for bad purposes. It can also be used to transform the world. I look at stories like how Land O’Lakes is leveraging data to help their Continue reading