Developed in the 80s, the DNS (Domain Name System) allowed the popularization of the internet and free access to common users. The main objective of this resource was to increase the functionality of the internet, enabling easy access and avoiding vulnerabilities present in this environment . However, without a strong focus on security and DNS-based threats.
For this reason, over the years, the Domain Name System – DNS has become a very vulnerable resource and the target of different types of attacks , such as amplification and denial of service and access forgery. Fortunately, advancements in technology have allowed the development of new strategies to optimize these attacks, making these threats a growing concern.
Understand how DNS works in practice:
According to the 2022 Global DNS Threat Report developed by IDC, around 88% of companies have suffered more than one DNS attack, with an average cost of $942,000. The report also shows that there is an average of seven attacks per year for each organization , highlighting the importance of adopting more effective security measures.
Browse the content of this article:
- Types of DNS attacks and their impacts
- Strategies for mitigating DNS attacks
- Importance of continuous monitoring of DNS infrastructure
- Preserving privacy through DNS innovations
- Access control and strong authentication strategies
- Effective implementation of DNSSEC in security strategy
- Employee Education: Defending Against Phishing Attacks
- Strategies to ensure resilience: backups and engagement with DNS providers
- Search for knowledge and specialized advice in cybersecurity
- Strengthening your cybersecurity with Lumiun solutions
Types of DNS-based threats and their impacts
Before we understand how different types of DNS attacks can affect your organization, we need to clarify the role of DNS attack vectors and how they are used. DNS attack vectors are strategies used by cybercriminals to directly affect a network's domain name system .
The cybercriminal's objective, in this case, is to affect the stability and availability of DNS services or to use this tool in an even more dangerous cyberattack strategy . The main DNS attack vectors are:
Volumetric and stealth DoS attacks
In this type of denial of service attack, the cybercriminal's main objective is to overload the DNS server. This is possible by sending a large number of simultaneous requests, which are carried out with the help of infected computers.
The result of this attack is service unavailability, where the company may suffer from reduced response time , or even worse, from the downtime of its system. An unavailable DNS server causes immense financial losses, in addition to impacting the company's image in the market and consumers.
Functioning similarly to denial of service attacks (volumetric DoS attacks), stealth DoS attacks are implemented more discreetly. Requests are sent constantly, increasing the flow of hits and demands on a page.
As a result, cybercriminals are able to exhaust processing capacity through continuous queries that are sent, degrading or completely interrupting a company's services.
Exploration
Exploit attacks utilize vulnerabilities or flaws that are found in a company's DNS services. These vulnerabilities allow indiscriminate access by cybercriminals and favor the incidence of other attacks.
Depending on the size of the attack, several services can be harmed at the same time and cause substantial damage to numerous companies.
Protocol Violation Attack
In this type of attack, the objective is not to make the DNS servers unavailable or to cause an overload on the system. Using DNS, cybercriminals can collect data improperly or encourage the application of an intense phishing .
Protocol violation attacks are extremely dangerous mainly because they allow the application of several other cyber scams.
Considering these vectors, it is possible to determine what the main types of attacks are and how they can harm your organization. Below are the main attack vectors used by cybercriminals:
Denial of Service Attack – DoS
As we said before, attacks and denial of services aim to flood a computer network to cause damage. By sending multiple requests to the server or network, cybercriminals can overload the system and cause services to become unavailable.
This excessive demand hinders the fulfillment of legitimate requests, damaging the company's image and causing great dissatisfaction on the part of consumers . Furthermore, this type of attack causes substantial financial losses, considering that during unavailability your company will no longer meet real demands.
Zero day attack
Considering the time between identifying a problem and developing a new update, service applications used are vulnerable to zero-day attacks . Cybercriminals use these unknown vulnerabilities in DNS servers to cause very damaging attacks.
These yet unidentified vulnerabilities are very difficult to combat, requiring a very preventive stance to avoid this type of attack.
DNS Cache Poisoning
DNS cache poisoning is also known as DNS spoofing, and is an attack aimed at corrupting or poisoning the DNS cache. This means that the cybercriminal replaces the legitimate DNS record with a malicious one.
The result of this is that the user can be tricked into handing over sensitive data, such as account information or access credentials. Using this information, criminals are able to improperly access confidential data and files.
DDoS attack
Distributed Denial of Service attacks work similarly to DoS attacks. In other words, the cybercriminal sends illegitimate requests to networks and servers, causing the traffic to cause unavailability of services.
This flood attack causes countless problems for companies, especially those that need their digital services to maintain business continuity. Due to this attack, legitimate demands cannot be delivered, hampering the smooth running of services.
DNS amplification attack
These attacks target DNS servers that are open and publicly accessible . Criminals flood a system with DNS response traffic through small illegitimate queries.
These small queries cause the DNS server to work on large responses, making it possible to increase the impact of the attack against the target.
Strategies for Mitigating DNS-Based Threats
The interruption of a company's services and systems caused by attacks targeting the DNS may result in the company not being able to be found in the digital environment. Furthermore, there is a major impact that this company will suffer due to its unavailability, damaging its image in the market and consumer perception.
While on one side of the screen the user receives an alert about an unavailable DNS server or DNS failure, on the other side the company is no longer accessible and visible to its potential consumers. The financial impact caused by this problem is immense and may even be irreversible depending on the organization's losses.
While not every DNS attack is configured as a denial of service attack, most DNS-based threats work this way. For this reason, it is essential that the company adopts DNS attack mitigation strategies to avoid the losses caused by these threats.
There are several solutions that can be implemented in your organization to avoid these DNS-based threats and maintain the continuity of your activities. The main strategies that can be used are:
DNS DDoS Protection
As part of a DDoS prevention package, DNS protection aims to ensure that the infrastructure and services offered by a company remain available. This tool must be chosen carefully, considering that false positives have a huge impact on the company.
This monitoring must be implemented together with your company's traffic modeling, protecting your services and ensuring only legitimate request traffic. An efficient monitoring tool will be able to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate users, preventing improper access and recognizing zero-day attack patterns.
DNSSEC
DNSSEC ( Domain Name System Security Extensions) is a security tool that helps add a layer of protection to the DNS system. This feature works by digitally signing DNS records, preventing them from being forged or tampered with during the transmission of information.
By acting proactively, this system will prevent intermed's traffic from being redirected to pages with malicious content or DNS-based threats and traps such as phishing . This way, your company will increase the authenticity and integrity of the DNS, preventing its manipulation and redirection.
DNS Filter
The DNS filter allows for more assertive monitoring and control of web traffic. Using DNS to block malicious pages and filter dangerous content, this tool helps to increase data security within the company and ensures that there is more complete control over the content that is accessed in the work environment.
Using this feature, your company will be able to prevent phishing emails, traps present on malicious pages and content that poses some risk from causing problems. This way, your security approach will be more complete and assertive.
firewall
The firewall is a security feature that allows monitoring of incoming and outgoing traffic and blocking of traffic based on pre-established security rules. Thanks to its functionality, the firewall is one of the main resources used in cybersecurity in recent decades, allowing the placement of a protective barrier between networks.
Depending on your company's security objective and strategy, you can choose a specific firewall, such as a proxy firewall, unified threat management firewall, next-generation firewall , among others. Choosing the ideal tool should be based on your company's needs and the threats that could harm the authenticity and security of your business.
Importance of continuous monitoring of DNS infrastructure
Considering the importance of DNS in functionality when carrying out numerous tasks in the digital environment, continuous monitoring is essential to increase the protection of your company. Monitoring techniques continue to help optimize business security and proactively identify possible atypical or malicious activities.
Taking into account that cybercriminals implement increasingly efficient strategies to invade your company's systems, this monitoring becomes an indispensable factor. Using a reliable tool, your company can stay one step ahead and ensure that your resources and information remain increasingly protected.
It is very important that a prevention posture is established in the face of DNS-based threats. This means that more than just solving problems when they happen, it is necessary to prepare to deal with these threats and, most importantly, prevent them from happening.
Monitoring tools will help generate alerts for suspicious activities and ensure that these problems are blocked before they cause any type of damage to your business. This way, your security strategy will be strengthened and your company will be able to provide increasingly more security for all users, collaborators, partners, and much more.
Preserving privacy through DNS innovations
Advances in technology have allowed the development of specific tools to ensure that DNS is a protected and effective resource. The translation carried out by the DNS system allows us to access pages easily , however, there are security aspects that must be strengthened to guarantee the protection of this resource.
DNS system encryption works based on two standards:
DNS over TLS (DoT)
DNS over TLS, or DoT, is a DNS query encryption standard aimed at increasing protection. This system uses the TLS security protocol, developed for encryption and authentication of communications carried out in the digital environment.
Also known as SSL, TLS ensures that DNS requests and responses are not intercepted, forged, or tampered with by cybercriminals . The basis of this tool is the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).
DNS over HTTPS (DoH)
This type of encryption presents itself as an alternative to DoT (DNS over TLS). In this case, queries also undergo encryption, but are sent over HTTP or HTTP/2 protocols . This means they are not sent directly over UDP.
However, it works in the same way as the DoT, preventing cybercriminals from hacking, altering or forging DNS traffic. DNS over HTTPs also adds an extra layer of security to networks and prevents them from being manipulated in any way by criminals.
Access control and strong authentication strategies
Considering the immense impact that DNS-based threats and the actions of cybercriminals can have on your company, it is extremely important to ensure a more efficient security strategy. Security features that for a long time were summarized as Firewall and antivirus have become even more complex.
The development of strategies aimed at diverting information and invading networks and devices has made the need for more specific tools increasingly greater. For this reason, it is essential to adopt access control and strong authentication strategies to protect your company's networks and devices.
This means that your employees need to go through a training and adaptation process to understand the importance of adopting quality passwords to prevent their easy deduction and access by unauthorized users . Furthermore, it is essential to adopt multi-factor authentication so that your company's critical systems remain protected. In this sense, we are also referring to DNS servers, which, although essential, also require more specific protection tools.
Access control is also a strategy that can help your company stay protected, preventing users from accessing content considered dangerous or malicious. This is because, using users' lack of knowledge or extraction, cybercriminals implement digital traps on pages that are considered harmless, hiding malicious files and applications in banners, links, and even suspicious news.
Secure DNS Settings to Minimize Risk
The main purpose of configuring your DNS server system is to increase security and restrict malicious access. To achieve this, there are some configurations that can be implemented in your company to optimize protection:
Restriction of zone transfers
DNS zone transfer is a kind of domain name server transaction. This strategy allows managers to replicate the DNS database across a set of servers, using the TCP protocol.
This mechanism is used to synchronize updated data on primary DNS servers, and can work in two different ways:
- Fullzone transfer (axfr): in this case, the primary DNS server notifies the secondary DNS server about possible changes made to a zone. When the primary DNS serial number is greater than the number in the secondary DNS , the zone file will be copied to the secondary DNS servers.
- Incremental Zone Transfer (IXFR): The primary DNS server notifies the secondary DNS server about changes made to a specific zone. When the serial number in the primary DNS is greater than that present in the secondary, these changes are compared and only the records that have changed are copied.
You can establish a more secure zone transfer through IP address restriction or DNS transfer signature.
Recursion Limitation
Recursion limitation will prevent the DNS network from performing recursive queries, preventing the response to any query from any IP. This measure will also prevent the recursive server from storing forged data, avoiding directing users to fake websites or cybercriminals redirecting servers during cyberattacks.
For this reason, recursion limitation works as a layer of protection in the DNS network. This strategy will mitigate the actions of malicious users and keep data protected.
Disabling unnecessary features
Cleaning up unnecessary resources in the DNS system will help eliminate obsolete records. Although DNS is fundamental to the use of digital resources, it also has unnecessary features that can increase your network's attack surface.
Effective implementation of DNSSEC in security strategy
DNSSEC is a DNS feature that allows you to add an extra layer of security to your DNS. As we said previously, it works by digitally signing DNS records to prevent their modification or falsification during data traffic.
For this reason, DNSSEC prevents cybercriminals from manipulating DNS records and causing problems with the authenticity and integrity of this resource. Using keys to sign digital DNS records, DNSSEC aims to ensure that the DNS records that are used match those provided in the servers' domain zone.
Implementing this security feature on your network will increase privacy and data security, preventing the main cyber attacks targeting the DNS, such as DNS cache poisoning attacks. Through it, it is possible to allow appropriate targeting of websites accessed by users, preventing access from illegitimate pages.
The crucial role of DNS traffic monitoring in proactive detection
For many years, the digital security strategy implemented by companies was based on a more reactive vision. This means that, instead of monitoring and mitigating inappropriate access, the strategy used was to deal with problems as they happen.
The advancement of technology has allowed a change in this paradigm, causing companies to adopt a more proactive view in detecting and preventing DNS-based threats. Security tools aimed at monitoring are implemented in order to prevent cyber problems before they even happen.
DNS monitoring allows you to detect suspicious activity, unauthorized changes, and unusual queries in this tool. This way, the company will be able to detect DNS-based threats before they can cause problems for the business.
Using Firewall and DNS filters to reinforce security
The use of Firewall and DNS filtering can be fundamental to strengthening your organization's security strategy. These tools allow for continuous monitoring of your digital resources and ensure that security on your company's networks and devices is strengthened.
The Firewall and DNS filter allow continuous monitoring with a focus on identifying and blocking malicious queries. This allows you to increase security and prevent these threats from being effective.
For this reason, it is essential that your company's focus on cybersecurity is on preventing rather than fixing problems. This way, cyber threats will not be effective and will not be able to cause problems.
Employee Education: Defending Against Phishing Attacks
Anti-phishing training is one of the most important approaches for companies that want to avoid the problems caused by this threat. Allowing the installation of malicious software, diverting confidential information and even harming your business devices, phishing attacks must be combatted through a multi-faceted approach.
This means that, in addition to using security tools aimed at blocking this type of cyber threat, it is necessary to establish an employee education process to ensure an extra layer of defense against phishing attacks. Implementing a culture of cybersecurity awareness will help users stay out of trouble and strengthen the protection strategy used by your organization.
Strategies to ensure resilience: backups and engagement with DNS providers
In addition to the measures mentioned above, it is also very important to back up DNS zones . Even if your DNS is outsourced to a GTI managed service provider, you also need to adopt a backup strategy.
We need to remember that regardless of the sector in which they operate, companies are vulnerable to cyber attacks, and it is essential to adopt resources and methodologies to avoid cyber attacks of all types. An example of this was the attack on DNS service providers DYN and Deutshe Telecom .
Giants in the internet services sector, DNS companies DYN and Deutshe Telecom suffered massive DDoS attacks that disrupted their services and resources for a long time, leaving more than 1 million people without internet. For this reason, it is necessary to prepare for any type of incident and ensure the continuity of your activities regardless of the attack suffered.
Search for knowledge and specialized advice in cybersecurity
We know that the advancement of technology and digital transformation have led to the development of more complete and specific security tools. For this reason, many companies do not feel prepared to deal with these resources and need the support of specialized advice.
Having support from a specialist company will help you stay up to date with the latest DNS-based threats and ensure that the best cybersecurity strategies are implemented.
With this, your company will always remain protected and ensure that all its resources are aimed at protecting against up-to-date threats, avoiding unnecessary and obsolete tools. In addition, specialized cybersecurity advice will also help you ensure that all vulnerabilities are being combatted in the best possible way.
Strengthening your cybersecurity with Lumiun solutions
As we can see throughout this material, a multi-layered approach will help bring more effectiveness and protection to your company's data, infrastructure and systems. Even though DNS is essential for browsing the internet, it has vulnerabilities and protecting this resource must be part of your security strategy.
To ensure even more complete protection, it is essential that your company's technology managers carry out regular audits to implement continuous improvements, helping to stay updated and protected as DNS-based threats also advance. User behavior must also be a priority, and it is essential that employees understand the importance of cybersecurity and increasingly safer browsing.
Lumiun solutions , such as Lumiun DNS and Lumiun Box , offer comprehensive resources for implementing the security practices mentioned throughout this material, helping your company ensure a solid and well-structured defense against the main cyber threats.
