Here we cover all your questions for DNS Security, Download the White paper to learn more about it.

Stopping attacks that use DNS is a major challenge. According to our Unit 42 threat research team, more than 80% of malware uses DNS to identify a command-and-control or C2 server to steal data and spread malware.

Protect your DNS traffic from millions of new malicious domains and stay ahead of advanced tactics like DNS tunneling. Our Unit 42 threat research team has identified the steps you can take to stop DNS attacks as well as understand:

• How real-world threats use DNS for C2 and data theft
• Challenges SOC teams face when addressing DNS-based malware
• New approaches to stop DNS abuse by covert adversaries

Frequently Asked Questions

DNS known as Domain Name System is the wide-open opportunity for all sophisticated attackers when it comes to Cybersecurity. DNS helps connecting links to the domain name to the IP. According to the research from the leaders in the Cyber-Security domain, 80% of the malware are pushed using DNS to initiate command –and – control. This uses advanced evasion tactics like DNS tunneling or a high volume of malicious domains.

At the time of the development of the DNS, Security was no concerns taken to mind, Hackers take this loophole as an opportunity and hijack the DNS with malicious threats. DNS Security is the protocol created to lighten the problem. DNS Security (DNSSEC) protects against attacks by digitally authenticating data to help ensure its validity. In order to ensure secure transactions, authentication must happen at every level in the DNS Validation process.

• Ones you enabled the DNS Security you get to know predictive analytics of the malicious content further this can be taken care from the treat intelligence team.
• Enabled DNS Security user gets their Domain protected against millions of malicious threats and you get a real time analytics of the threats
• DNS Security enables your security team / personnel and fundamentally it helps them to improve or do changes in the security posture, polices to remediate security events.
• DNS Security provides complete visibility in to your DNS Traffic
• DNS Security Avoid insecure host-based resolvers and their maintenance

Attacker can easily identify vulnerability and redirect the domain name on his desired location, if DNS Security is not enabled. We all cannot imagine embarrassment of not accessing our own company website due to an attack. In many of the worst cases, online banking system gets corrupted due to the DNS attack. That’s where the importance of the DNS Security comes in to the picture. Organizations must be serious about their DNS Security.

DNS spoofing/cache poisoning: This is an attack where fraud DNS data is introduced into a DNS resolver’s cache, resulting in the resolver returning an incorrect IP address for a domain. Instead of going to the correct website, traffic can be diverted to a malicious machine or anywhere else the attacker desires; often this will be a replica of the original site used for malicious purposes such as distributing malware or collecting login information.

DNS tunnelling: This attack uses other protocols to tunnel through DNS queries and responses. Attackers can use SSH, TCP, or HTTP to pass malware or stolen information into DNS queries, undetected by most firewalls.

DNS hijacking: In DNS hijacking the attacker redirects queries to a different domain name server. This can be done either with malware or with the unauthorized modification of a DNS server. Although the result is similar to that of DNS spoofing, this is a fundamentally different attack because it targets the DNS record of the website on the nameserver, rather than a resolver’s cache.

Phantom domain attack: A phantom domain attack has a similar result to an NXDOMAIN attack on a DNS resolver. The attacker sets up a bunch of ‘phantom’ domain servers which either respond to requests very slowly or not at all. The resolver is then hit with a flood of requests to these domains and the resolver gets tied up waiting for responses, leading to slow performance and denial-of-service.

NXDOMAIN attack: This is a type of DNS flood attack where an attacker inundates a DNS server with requests, asking for records that don’t exist, in an attempt to cause a denial-of-service for legitimate traffic. This can be accomplished using sophisticated attack tools which can auto-generate unique subdomains for each request. NXDOMAIN attacks can also target a recursive resolver with the goal of filling the resolver’s cache with junk requests.

Domain lock-up attack: Bad actors orchestrate this form of attack by setting up special domains and resolvers to create TCP connections with other legitimate resolvers. When the targeted resolvers send requests, these domains send back slow streams of random packets, tying up the resolver’s resources.

Random subdomain attack: In this case, the attacker sends DNS queries for several random, non-existent subdomains of one legitimate site. The goal is to create a denial-of-service for the domain’s authoritative nameserver, making it impossible to lookup the website from the nameserver. As a side effect, the ISP serving the attacker may also be impacted, as their recursive resolver’s cache will be loaded with bad requests.

Botnet-based CPE attack: These attacks are carried out using CPE devices (Customer Premise Equipment, this is hardware given out by service providers for use by their customers, such as modems, routers, cable boxes, etc.) The attackers compromise the CPEs and the devices become part of a botnet, used to perform random subdomain attacks against one site or domain.