Our topic for today seems to be centered around the most common 10 DNS attacks and how to effectively mitigate them. We’ll dive into the details of each attack, their potential impact, and recommended measures to help protect against them.
DNS stands for the system, which remains under constant attack, and thus, we can assume there is no end in sight because the threats are growing increasingly.
DNS generally uses UDP fundamentally and, in some cases, uses TCP as well. It uses the UDP protocol, which is connectionless and can be tricked easily.
Thus, the DNS protocol is remarkably popular as a DDoS tool. DNS is recognized as the internet’s phonebook, a component of the global internet foundation that transmutes between well-known names and the number that a computer needs to enter a website and send an email.
DNS has long been the target of attackers looking to take all corporate and secret data; hence, the past year’s warnings indicate a worsening condition.
As per the IDC’s research, the average costs correlated with a DNS mugging rose by 49% compared with a year earlier. However, in the U.S., a DNS attack’s average price is more than $1.27 million.
Approximately half of the respondents (48%) say they wasted more than $500,000 on a DNS attack, and about 10% say they lost more than $5 million on each break. In extension, the preponderance of U.S. companies say it took more than one day to determine a DNS attack.
Shockingly, as per the information, both in-house and cloud applications were destroyed, and the 100% growth of threats in the in-house application interlude is now the most widespread destruction experienced by IDC.
Thus, “DNS attacks are running away from real brute force to more complicated attacks running from the internal network. Thus, the complicated attack will push the organizations to use intelligent mitigation tools so that they can easily cope with insider threats.”
Therefore, we have provided the top 10 DNS attacks and the proper solutions to fix them, making it easy for organizations to recognize the attacks and quickly solve them.
DNS (Domain Name System) attacks are various forms of malicious activities aimed at disrupting the normal operation of the domain name resolution process, which is crucial for the functioning of the internet. Here are some common DNS attack vectors:
What is a DNS Attack?
What type of attack is a DNS Attack?
What is a DNS attack by a Hacker?
Is the DNS Firewall safe?
10 Famous DNS Attacks Type Features
10 Dangerous DNS Attack Types
1. DNS Cache Poisoning Attack
2. Distributed Reflection Denial of Service
3. DNS Hijacking
4. Phantom Domain Attack
5. DNS Flood Attack
6. Random Subdomain Attack
7. Botnet-based Attacks
8. Domain Hijacking
9. DNS Tunneling
10. TCP-SYN Floods
11. DNS Attack Mitigation
Conclusion
Also Read
An attack on the domain name system (DNS) can take several forms. Malicious actors can exploit DNS vulnerabilities in a variety of ways.
The majority of these attacks are aimed at blocking users from accessing specific websites by misusing the Domain Name System (DNS). Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are a broad category that includes these incidents.
DNS vulnerabilities can also be used in a technique known as DNS hijacking, which redirects users to hostile websites.With techniques like DNS tunneling, attackers can exploit the DNS protocol to secretly transmit data outside of an organization.
When an attacker takes advantage of flaws in the DNS, they are launching a DNS attack.
Due to the fact that DNS requests and responses are not always encrypted, browsers are vulnerable to DNS hijacking attacks.
A hacker can extort money from you by sending you to one of their malicious websites if they intercept you here.
In order to prevent phishing and malware downloads at the DNS level, a DNS firewall can automatically block the most dangerous traffic sources.By preventing resolved responses to intercepted DNS queries, networks, and devices are protected from potential threats.
In order to prevent phishing and malware downloads at the DNS level, a DNS firewall can automatically block the most dangerous traffic sources.Due to the fact that DNS requests and responses are not always encrypted, browsers are vulnerable to DNS hijacking attacks.
A hacker can extort money from you by sending you to one of their malicious websites if they intercept you here.
InFamous DNS Attacks Type | Attack Possiblities |
---|---|
1. DNS Cache Poisoning Attack | 1. Exploitation of DNS Caching 2. Spoofing DNS Responses 3. Manipulation of DNS Records 4. DNS Transaction ID Spoofing 5.Putting network functions and communication at risk. |
2. Distributed Reflection Denial of Service | 1. Amplification 2. Reflection 3. Distributed Nature 4. IP Spoofing 5. Because it is spread, it is hard to fix. |
3. DNS Hijacking | 1. Manipulation of DNS Records 2. Phishing and Credential Theft 3. Malware Distribution 4. DNS Server Compromise 5.Credentials may have been stolen. |
4. Phantom Domain Attack | 1. Amplification 2. Reflection 3. Distributed Nature 4. IP Spoofing 5. Because it is spread, it is hard to fix. |
5. DNS Flood Attack | 1. Massive DNS Query Traffic 2. UDP or TCP Protocol 3. Spoofed Source IP Addresses 4. Amplification and Reflection Techniques 5.To combat, use mitigation. |
6. Random Subdomain Attack | 1. It makes a lot of strange subdomains. 2. aims at DNS and domain systems. 3. DNS servers and authoritative services are overloaded. 4. hides the purpose of the attack. 5. It could mess up DNS resolution and the operation of services. |
7. Botnet-based Attacks | 1. Botnet Formation 2. Command and Control (C&C) 3. Distributed and Coordinated Attacks 4. DDoS Attacks 5. It’sard to find the specific attackers. |
8. Domain Hijacking | 1. Unauthorized Transfer of Ownership 2. DNS Configuration Manipulation 3. Subdomain Creation or Modification 4. Email Account Takeover 5.Needs security and domain recovery methods. |
9. DNS Tunneling | 1. Protocol Abuse 2. Encapsulation of Non-DNS Traffic 3. DNS Query-Based Tunneling 4. DNS Response-Based Tunneling 5.Needs to look at DNS data to fix the problem. |
10. TCP-SYN Floods | 1. Exploitation of TCP Handshake 2. Exhaustion of Server Resources 3. Spoofed Source IP Addresses 4. Connection Backlog Overflow 5.Often used for hacking and messing up networks. |
11.DNS Attack Mitigation | 1. Limiting the rate 2. Add-ons for Domain Name System Security 3. Anycast Router 4. Proxy and DNS Filtering 5. Putting together threat intelligence |
Cache poisoning is one of the most common attacks on the web and is designed to trick users into visiting fraudulent sites when they visit legitimate ones, such as when someone visits gmail.com to check their email.
Additionally, the DNS is corroding, resulting in the display of a scam website instead of the gmail.com page, for example, to regain access to the victim’s email account.
Therefore, users who type in the proper domain name will be tricked into visiting a fraudulent website. The severity of the attack and the damage done by DNS poisoning depends on several variables.
Simply put, it creates a fantastic opportunity for hackers to utilize phishing techniques to steal personal or financial information from naive victims.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
DNS Cache Poisoning Attack | Illegal and Unethical |
Stealthy Attack | Disruption of Services |
Impact on a Wide Range of Users | Potential for Collateral Damage |
DNS Cache Poisoning Attack – Trial / Demo
The goal of a distributed reflective denial of service (DRDoS) attack is to flood a target with so many UDP acknowledgments that it becomes unavailable.Attackers have been known to move DNS, NTP, etc. records in some cases.
They require a spoofed source IP in order to credit the host that actually operates at the faked address with a larger amount of acknowledgment.UDP is the protocol of different alternatives for this sort of attack, as it does not build a connection state.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that a TCP connection terminated as soon as the SYN/ACK packet disappeared due to an IP address spoofing attack.When these reaction packs start showing up, the target becomes unavailable.
When these attacks are controlled at the right scale, the concept of collective reflection becomes obvious; this results in multiple endpoints broadcasting faked UDP offers, generating acknowledgments that will be directed at a single target.
How to prevent?
After a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has begun, it is far more difficult for a company to respond effectively.
While it is impossible to completely prevent DDoS assaults, some measures may be taken to make it more difficult for an attacker to render a network inaccessible.
The following steps will help you scatter organizational assets to bypass performing a single deep target on an attacker.
For a company that relies on servers and Internet ports, it is vital to ensure that devices are geographically spread and not placed in a particular data center.
In addition, if the resources are already spread out, it is crucial to check that not all data stations are connected to the same internet provider and that each data station has multiple channels to the internet.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Amplification Effect | Legal Consequences |
Difficulty in Attribution | Collateral Damage |
Wide Impact | Increased Awareness and Mitigation Measures |
Wide Impact | Reputation Damage |
Distributed Reflection Denial of Service – Trial / Demo
By using a technique known as “DNS hijacking,” an individual can be redirected to an untrustworthy DNS.Malicious malware or illegal server modifications may be used to do this, though.
In the meantime, the person has control of the DNS and can direct those who gain it to a website that looks identical but provides additional material, such as adverts.They may also direct consumers to malicious websites or alternative search engines.
How to Prevent?
A DNS name server is a compassionate foundation that needs necessary protection measures because it can be hijacked and used by several hackers to raise DDoS attacks on others, thus, here we have mentioned some prevention of DNS hijacking.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Traffic Diversion | Illegal and Unethical |
Stealthy Attack | Trust and Reputation Loss |
Targeted Attacks | Disruption of Services |
DNS Hijacking – Trial / Demo
Attacks from a phantom domain are similar to those from a casual subdomain.Because these “phantom” domains never respond to DNS queries, the attackers in this type of assault overwhelm your DNS resolver and drain its resources looking for them.
The goal of this attack is to cause the DNS resolver server to wait for an excessive amount of time before giving up or giving a poor response, both of which are bad for DNS performance.
How to Prevent?
To identify phantom domain attacks, you can analyze your log messages. Moreover, you can also follow the steps that we have mentioned below to mitigate this attack.
When you allow any of the options, the failure values are set at an excellent level for overall operations.
However, you should keep the default charges while using these commands; moreover, it guarantees that you know the consequences if you want to replace the default values.
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Concealment | Detection |
Social engineering | Countermeasures |
Persistence | Reputational damage |
Phantom domain attack – Trial / Demo
One of the most common forms of DNS attacks is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that targets your domain name system (DNS).
All the treated DNS zones affect the function of resource records, which is why the main goal of this form of DNS flood is to completely overload your server so that it can’t continue serving DNS requests.
Since this type of attack often originates from a single IP, it is simple to mitigate.When a DDoS involves hundreds or thousands of people, however, things might get tricky.
The approach of mitigation can be tricky at times since many inquiries will be quickly identified as malicious bugs, and many valid requests will be made to confuse defense equipment.
How to Prevent?
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have begun to focus on the Domain Name System (DNS).Any domain information stored in a DNS that is the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) flood attack becomes unavailable.
As a result, we’ve developed a strategy for dealing with these kinds of attacks that involves updating old information on a regular basis and keeping track of the domain names that get the most queries across many DNS providers.
Therefore, the results of our simulations indicate that our approach can successfully process over 70% of the total cache replies even under the most severe DNS Flood assault conditions.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
High traffic volume | Legal and ethical consequences |
Amplification effect | Service disruption for legitimate users |
Reflection and spoofing | Reputational damage |
DNS Flood Attack – Trial / Demo
While not the most common form of DNS attack, it does occur on occasion across a number of networks.Because their construction follows the same purpose as simple DoS, random subdomain attacks are often characterized as DoS attacks.
Just in case spoilers start bombarding a perfectly good and functioning domain with DNS requests, we’ve got you covered.However, the main domain name will not be the focus of the inquiries, but rather, many dead subdomains.
The goal of this assault is to create a denial-of-service (DoS) that will overwhelm the official DNS server that is responsible for handling the primary domain name, hence preventing any DNS record lookups from taking place.
The searches will originate from infected people who are unaware they are sending particular types of queries, from what are finally genuine PCs, making this an assault that is difficult to identify.
How to Prevent?
Thus we have provided you a simple method for preventing the random subdomain attack only in a 30-minute.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Evasion of security controls | Limited impact |
Increased attack surface | Countermeasures |
Social engineering opportunities |
Random Subdomain Attack – Trial /Demo
To be more specific, a botnet is a collection of compromised Internet-connected devices that can be used to launch a coordinated denial-of-service attack, during which the compromised devices can be used to steal information, send out spam, and grant the attacker full control over the compromised device and its network connection.
In addition, botnets are dynamic dangers; as our reliance on digital gadgets, the internet, and future technology grows, so too will the sophistication of these attacks.
This paper investigates the description and organization of a botnet, its creation, and use, with the assumption that botnets can be seen as attacks and as programs for future attacks.
How to Prevent?
This is one of the frequent DNS attacks faced by the victims every day, thus to mitigate these types of attacks, we have mentioned below a few steps so that it will be helpful for you.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Distributed Power | Illegal and Unethical |
Anonymity | Privacy Violations |
Resource Availability | Detection and Mitigation |
Botnet-based Attacks – Trial / Demo
In this kind of assault, the attacker modifies your domain registrar and DNS servers in order to reroute your traffic elsewhere.
Many factors revolve around an attacker taking advantage of a security hole in a domain registrar’s system, however domain hijacking can also occur at the DNS level if an attacker gains control of your DNS data.
Therefore, when an attacker takes control of your domain name, they can use it to launch attacks, such as setting up a phony page for payment systems like PayPal, Visa, or bank systems.
In order to steal sensitive information like email addresses and passwords, attackers will create a fake website that looks and acts just like the original.
How to Prevent?
Thus you can simply mitigate the domain hijacking by practicing a few steps that we have mentioned below.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Control over the domain | Loss of control and reputation |
Identity theft and fraud | Disruption of services |
Financial gain | Legal consequences |
Domain Hijacking – Trial / Demo
This cyberattack makes use of the DNS acknowledgment and query channels to transmit encoded data from several apps.
While it was never intended for widespread usage, this technology is now routinely employed in assaults because of its ability to circumvent interface safeguards.
Intruders need physical access to a target system, a domain name, and a DNS authoritative server in order to conduct DNS tunneling.
How to Prevent?
To configure the firewall to identify and block DNS tunneling by designing an application rule that uses some protocol object, we have mentioned three steps to mitigate these types of attacks.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Evasion of network security controls | Detection challenges |
Concealment | Increased attack surface |
Protocol versatility | Network performance impact |
DNS tunneling – Trial / Demo
A simple Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, a SYN Flood can disrupt any service that uses the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to communicate over the internet.
Common infrastructure components like load balancers, firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and utilization servers can be vulnerable to SYN waves, a form of TCP State-Exhaustion attack that attempts to exploit the connection element tables included in these components.
Therefore, even high-capacity equipment designed to manage millions of links can be brought down by this kind of attack.
Additionally, a TCP SYN flood attack is when an attacker sends an overwhelming number of SYN queries to a system in an effort to crash it and render it unable to respond to new genuine connection offers.
As a result, it promotes a condition in which all information ports on the target server are partially open.
How to Prevent?
Firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), while crucial, are not enough to prevent complicated DDoS attacks.
The increasingly complex nature of attacks necessitates a holistic solution that goes beyond basic network upkeep and internet connectivity.
Thus there are some capabilities that you can count for more powerful DDoS security and faster mitigation of TCP SYN flood attacks.
Extensible to handle attacks of all sizes, extending from low-end to high-end and high-end to low-end.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
Effective at disrupting services | Risk of collateral damage |
Simple implementation | Potential legal consequences |
Difficult to mitigate | Reputational damage |
TCP SYN Floods – Trial / Demo
As per the information, there are numerous forms to solve or to prevent this attack.For starters, the IT teams should configure DNS servers to rely as minimal as possible on trust relations with other DNS servers.
Doing so will make it harder for attackers to practice debasing target servers via DNS servers.The DNS name servers should also be configured by IT teams to prevent cache poisoning attacks via:-
To put limits on deeply nested queries.
To only save information that pertains to the specified domain.
For queries to return only the specified domain-specific data.
In addition, there are a few cache poisoning techniques available to aid institutions in halting poisoning outbreaks.
DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extension), developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, is the most well-known solution for preventing cache poisoning since it offers trustworthy DNS data authentication.
How Does the Attack Works?
What is Good ? | What Could Be Better ? |
---|---|
DNS Attack Mitigation – Cache poisoning | Reduced Disruption and Downtime |
Data Integrity | Potential Performance Impact |
Enhanced Trust and Reputation | Operational Overhead |
DNS Attack Mitigation – Trial / Demo
Conclusion
As you see, DNS service is essential for preserving your companies’ websites and online assistance working day-to-day. Thus if you’re looking for methods to evade these kinds of DNS attacks, then this post will be helpful for you.
So, what do you think about this? Simply share all your views and thoughts in the comment section below.And if you liked this post then simply do not forget to share this post with your friends and family.
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