DNS Intelligence — How it works?
DNS intelligence or DNS threat intelligence means the holistic data that is gathered from the DNS system and the interaction between different clients and servers. It is a crucial part of the OSINT and reconnaissance phase while investigating a particular target from a cyber investigation or Red team perspective.
DNS is a critical component of the internet. It is essentially a telephone book that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because of its ubiquity, DNS provides a highly attractive channel for advanced threat actors to exploit the DNS system for a variety of threat vectors. The below illustration shows an overview of the complete DNS Intelligence framework.
What is the role played by DNS Intelligence?
What includes in DNS Intelligence?
It includes all the data that we can gather from DNS records. Some of the important ingredients of DNS intelligence are shown in image below:
Conclusion
Obtaining internal threat intelligence for DNS requires specific features from the DNS vendor to recognize DNS attack patterns, which many traditional DNS vendors still lack today. This type of intelligence usually relies on query logging and reporting then an analysis of the data would need to be performed after the fact to identify potential internal DNS-based threats. The major drawback of this approach is that, by the time the analysis is complete, it is usually too late to take action against the malicious activity that took place.
Today’s more advanced DNS security products, such as Dynamic Threat Intelligence Assessment, inspect the traffic on-the-wire, as the queries and responses are passing through the DNS servers, analyzing them in real-time. This approach builds internal threat intelligence much faster and is more suited for the fast-paced world of security. When dealing with large amounts of queries, the detection engine can tap into the greater computing power of the cloud, alleviating the DNS servers of any performance degradation, while catching the attacker red-handed as the crime is still in progress.
