A major hack attack which hit a company called Dyn (pronounced Dine) was in the news last week, after it briefly took down a number of high-profile sites including Twitter. Many large web sites use Dyn to handle the DNS side of their business.

DNS is the reason that you can type www.techsupportalert.com into your web browser instead of having to type http://72.52.134.16. It's a global directory of IP addresses, and the domain names to which they correspond. Whenever you type www.techsupportalert.com into your web browser, your computer or your router first have to connect to a DNS server in order to look up the corresponding IP address. And if that DNS server isn't available, you won't be able to get to the web site.

Unless you have actively configured your system otherwise, your computer and your router are probably programmed to use the DNS server provided by your internet service provider. But you can, if you wish, change those settings and use a different DNS server instead. This can have its advantages. Some of the freely available DNS servers are probably faster than the one provided by your ISP, and some of them also block access to sites that are known to serve up malware. So you can increase your overall security too.  Read More