Do you understand DNS attacks and is your network protected against them? The DNS was created primarily to respond to requests correctly and efficiently, not to speculate on its purpose. As a result, DNS has the potential for hacking and serious vulnerabilities.
In a Domain Name System (DNS) attack, a malicious actor attempts to hack into the network’s DNS or uses its built-in advantages to launch a more extensive attack. A well planned DNS attack has the power to destroy an organization. This article will cover the top four categories of DNS attacks leading to enterprise cybersecurity breaches in 2022.
dns tunneling
Encrypting data from other applications or protocols within DNS requests and responses is known as DNS tunneling. In simple words, it includes a lot of data that can hijack a DNS server and allow hackers to control a remote server and its applications.
DNS tunneling often relies on the external network connectivity of the hacked system as a backdoor to an internal DNS server with access to the network. You also need to control the server and domain, which serves as the authoritative server and performs server-side tunneling and data transfer executables.
DNS amplification
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) occurs when DNS amplification is attacked and floods the target with DNS response traffic, allowing them to use open DNS servers that are publicly available.
However, hackers send a DNS lookup request to an open DNS server and spoof the source address to get the destination address. The DNS record response is transmitted to the new target, but it is already under the influence of the attacker when the DNS server delivers it to it.
DNS flood attack
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flooding can be detected using a DNS flood attack. Hackers launch fake DNS request packets at very high speeds before spoofing a wide variety of IP addresses.
The target’s DNS servers start responding to all requests, as they appear to be valid. A large number of requests can destroy the DNS server. Most DNS attackers use a large amount of network resources, modeling a specific DNS infrastructure that goes down or fails, causing interruption of Internet access.
DNS spoofing
DNS spoofing, also known as DNS cache poisoning, is the practice of using up-to-date DNS records to redirect network traffic to a malicious website that appears to be the intended location. Users are asked to enter their accounts after reaching the fake location.
Basically, they give the threat actor an opportunity to steal certain login credentials, as well as some sensitive information entered into the fake login form after entering the information. Similarly, these malicious websites are used to download viruses onto users’ devices and this allows hackers to perform the hacking process to obtain data from the user’s device.
final thoughts
There are several ways to mitigate DNS attacks. One way would be to limit the rate of DNS queries. This would stop a DDoS attack, as it takes time to reach the query limit. Another way would be to use response policies.
This would allow the administrator to control what information is provided in response to a DNS query. For example, an administrator can choose to only provide information about A records and not about CNAME records.
Finally, another way to mitigate DNS attacks is to use ingress filtering. This would filter out illegitimate DNS traffic before it reaches the DNS server. These are just a few ways to mitigate large-scale DNS attacks.
Categories: How to
Source: HIS Education