How DNS Works and Why Its Vulnerabilities Can Bring Down the Internet

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The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundational technology that translates human-readable website names into numerical addresses computers use to communicate. Before DNS, the early internet relied on a single text file called HOSTS.TXT, maintained centrally at Stanford, which became unmanageable as the network grew. In 1983, Paul Mockapetris proposed a distributed, hierarchical naming system that was later formalised in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035, published in November 1987. DNS operates as a tree structure — from root servers down through top-level domains to individual authoritative nameservers — allowing responsibility to be distributed across the internet rather than held in one place. When a user visits a website, a resolver queries this hierarchy in sequence to retrieve the correct address, making DNS both a critical enabler of internet scale and a potential single point of failure if compromised.

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