One of the Most Important DNS Records You’ve Probably Never Heard of

This DNS records upgrade will make your website much more safe. We all know about SSL certificates and how important they are to websites these days. SSL certificates protect the data that is transmitting from the server to the users’ computer. Without an SSL in place, bad guys can sniff the transactional data between a website and a server and scrape out passwords and other sensitive information.

And that’s what an SSL certificate protects this transfer process by encrypting all the data, and requiring a decryptor to understand what it is so only the trusted parties can read the information. So SSL certificates are super important, but I’ll bet you didn’t know about a DNS record that goes with SSL to protect their issuing status.

See the issue is there are tons and tons of SSL issuers. Because of this, anyone in the world can spin up an SSL certificate for your website even if they do not own your website and embed malicious content into that SSL. This was a huge security issue up until recently when the Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) system came into play.

Basically, it is a DNS record called CAA that shows exactly who issued your SSL and does not allow anyone to issue any other SSL if they are not from that provider. This is a huge deal for security and it’s something that anyone who owns an SSL or website should be looking into setting up.

It’s super simple to do, just navigate to your domains DNS settings and add a new CAA record. In this record you are going to want to put:

yourdomain.com CAA 0 issue “skypnt.io”

Replace yourdomain.com with your actual doman and “skypnt.io” with whoever issued your SSL. That’s it! Now you are protected against anyone hijacking your SSL and using it for malicious activity. Need help setting up the CAA record? Drop us a line or call us at 406-208-8733

0 replies

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone

Jophiel Silvestrone has written 326 posts in the Tech Blog.

Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.