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Router locking up? Wifi failing? No internet? Turn off DNS Proxy!
My low-end, business-grade router has been having increasingly common failures over the past year, but the problem really got bad over the last month. It finally prompted me to look for solutions, and I found these two articles: http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/sharp-rise-in-dns-based-ddos-last-year-signals-larger-more-frequent-attacks-in-2015/d/d-id/1318982 https://threatpost.com/dns-based-amplification-attacks-key-on-home-routers/105220 Neither article - or any other that I found among the first few searches that I did - said anything about a solution as simple as turning off the DNS proxy in the router, but that seems to have worked in my case. The ramifications of this are that attached systems will have to go out to your ISP's DNS servers for every name request - in other words, very slightly slowing web page loads - but the ISP's servers will likely be robust enough to not have problems related to the above mentioned vulnerability. It seems that some of our routers do. The longer term solution will likely involve a firmware update that fixes the DNS proxy so that it can no longer be corrupted by unrequested, WAN-side DNS updates. But knowing our favorite vendor, that might take a while. In the meantime, try this easy workaround. Post back with your results, and please mention the router model that you have. Hope that helps! Jim Rothe, CISSP running a Netgear FVS318N