I am please to announce a new release of the ThreatSTOP cloud service. With this release we are able to support subscribers whose public IP address changes from time to time. Typically these are subscribers to ADSL services where a new IP address is obtained whenever the ADSL link is reestablished but it may also apply to other internet connectivity types as well. We have added this capability by adding support for specifying a DNS name instead of an IP address when configuring a device. We expect the majority of subscribers to use a dynamic dns service such as dyndns.org or no-ip.com but any dns name can be entered, all that is necessary is that the dns record be updated promptly once the ip address has changed.

New field

Subscribers who add (or modify) a device on threatstop now have a radio button option to select between static and dynamic address types (see above). By clicking on dynamic they are able to add the DNS name of the device

Now, every 15 minutes when we update our blocklists and ACLs we will attempt to resolve the DNS name and use that IP address we get back in the relevant ACLs. If the DNS name does not resolve correctly then the firewall will not be able to download the blocklists.

Improved Reporting

In addition to the dynamic IP support we have also add some more information sources to our drilldown menu for reporting and modified the "Research" page to change the summary whois information shown there. While neither of these changes is huge, we believe that they will help our customers and partners get better use out of the log data they submit to us.

Speed Improvements

Behind the scenes we have made a number of other improvements that increase the scalability and performance of our service but these are, we hope, transparent to our subscribers.