Tuesday’s election defied virtually all expert opinion confidently put forth on traditional media channels. As many pundits have since accurately, albeit belatedly, noted, the outcome was a complete rejection of the country’s political establishment. More than that, it was a repudiation of the centralized, elite-driven information network that wrongly believed it still held a monopoly on public opinion. The result of this year’s presidential election is a stark indicator that the dominance of newspapers and cable television has passed, and that the new barometer of the public mood is social media—which Donald Trump understood better than any of the analysts and commentators who predicted his defeat.

We recently decided to make our DNS infrastructure inside each of our core data centers more robust and therefore installed three virtual servers on three different hypervisors to function as DC-local recursive DNS servers. We chose an unbound DNS recursive resolver for this task, as we had positive experience with it from the past and we already had collectd scripts for its performance monitoring, as well as the necessary puppet modules.

At Avast Threat Labs, we are constantly monitoring the threat landscape and evaluating current risks. Most of the time, we face prevalent strains of malware, such as Locky or Cerber ransomware, but from time to time we are alerted by our automated systems about anomalies within active in-the-wild samples. These alerts are either new techniques used by known malware or a discovery of a new strain.