The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has changed how users interact with the world and, particularly, with the Internet. Many employees may now be working from home (or may have been laid off). Colleges and universities largely shuttered their campuses and went online. During the pandemic, online shopping supplanted visits to brick-and-mortar stores and leisure travel had largely ceased. Binge-watching streaming television has replaced going out for dinner, drinks, and a traditional movie. The world we inhabited in 2020 and early 2021 is NOT the same world we inhabited at the end of 2019.
Many of these business and lifestyle changes are captured in a new, timely research report, "DNS Network Traffic Volumes During the Pandemic: April 2020-March 2021," which examines DNS cache miss traffic levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, over a 12-month period (April 2020-March 2021) for over 300 second-level domains drawn from 12 broad vertical categories, including government, travel and transportation, retail, videoconferencing, streaming video, social media, higher education and news. The report, which provides graphs for each individual domain, from AA.com and CNBC.com to YouTube.com, Safeway.com and Netflix.com, also reveals some surprising findings such as evidence of volumetric randomized subdomain DoS attacks leveraging wildcard domains.
The new report is a followup to our report, "DNS Network Traffic Volumes During the 2020 Pandemic.," which provided a two-month snapshot of DNS network traffic volumes during the pandemic.
