Four main types of DNS attacks and how to mitigate them

Do you understand DNS attacks and is your network protected against them? The DNS was created primarily to respond correctly and efficiently to requests, not to speculate on its purpose. As a result, DNS has the potential for serious attacks and vulnerabilities.

In a Domain Name System (DNS) assault, a malicious actor attempts to hack into a 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 the remote server and its applications.

DNS tunneling often relies on a hacked system’s external network connectivity as a backdoor to an internal DNS server with network access. You also need to control a server and a domain, which serves as an authoritative server and performs server-side tunneling and data payload executable programs.

DNS amplification

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) occurs when DNS amplification is attacked and floods a target with DNS response traffic, allowing them to use open DNS servers that are available to the public.

However, hackers send a DNS lookup request to the open DNS server and trick the source address to get the destination address. The response from the DNS record is passed to the new target, but it is already under the attackers’ influence when the DNS server delivers it.

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DNS flood attack

User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flooding can be accomplished using DNS flood attacks. Hackers drop fake DNS request packets at a very high packet rate 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 the specific DNS infrastructure that goes down or fails and because of this, Internet access is cut off.

DNS spoofing

DNS spoofing, also known as DNS cache poisoning, is the practice of using up-to-date DNS records to redirect online traffic to a malicious website that appears to be the intended location. Users are prompted to enter their accounts once they reach the fake location.

Basically, they give the threat actor an opportunity to steal particular login credentials as well as particular sensitive information entered into the fake login form after entering the information. Similarly, these harmful websites are used to download viruses on the user’s devices and that allows hackers to perform the hacking process to get the data from the user’s device.

final thoughts

There are a few ways to mitigate DNS attacks. One way would be to limit the rate of DNS queries. This would stop a DDoS attack because 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, the administrator could choose to only provide information about A records and not about CNAME records.

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Finally, another way to mitigate DNS attacks is through ingress filtering. This would filter out illegitimate DNS traffic before it reaches the DNS server. These are just a few ways to help mitigate major DNS attacks.

Categories: How to
Source: vtt.edu.vn

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