Category: DNS and Big Data

As DNS telemetry becomes increasingly vital for security analytics, operational monitoring, and digital forensics, the complexity of DNS data pipelines has grown substantially. Modern architectures span multiple ingestion points, enrichment layers, transformation jobs, federated data lakes, and machine learning workflows. Each stage in this pipeline consumes, modifies, or augments DNS data, introducing the need for…

In the modern cybersecurity ecosystem, DNS telemetry has become a vital signal for threat detection, behavioral analysis, and incident response. It offers a rich, low-level view of network behavior that is often protocol-agnostic and difficult for attackers to obfuscate completely. As a result, organizations across sectors have integrated DNS logging into their security data lakes,…

In the increasingly sophisticated landscape of cyber threats, adversaries often leverage multiple communication channels in tandem to execute complex attack chains. One of the most common and dangerous combinations involves the use of DNS and email to initiate, distribute, and coordinate malicious activity. Phishing campaigns frequently rely on deceptive domain names resolved through DNS to…

DNS is a foundational protocol in every digital environment, quietly resolving names to IPs across user sessions, microservices, and edge networks. While passive DNS telemetry collected from resolvers and span ports has long been used for analysis, the increasing adoption of service mesh architectures and programmable proxies has opened new frontiers for inline DNS analytics.…

Anycast is a routing technique that allows multiple, geographically distributed instances of a DNS server to share the same IP address, with the routing system directing queries to the nearest or most efficient instance. In the DNS ecosystem, Anycast is widely used by root server operators, TLD registries, global content delivery networks, and enterprise resolvers…

The collection and analysis of DNS data at scale has become a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity, network optimization, threat intelligence, and digital experience monitoring. DNS, by design, is a revealing protocol—each query made by a client device can expose a small piece of that user’s digital intent, whether it’s visiting a website, updating software, syncing…

DNSSEC, or Domain Name System Security Extensions, is a critical security protocol designed to protect DNS responses from tampering and forgery by providing cryptographic assurance of authenticity. Despite its clear value in strengthening the trust model of the internet, DNSSEC adoption has been uneven across registries, operators, and domain holders. Understanding where and how DNSSEC…

Operating a petabyte-scale passive DNS dataset is a monumental undertaking that intersects the domains of distributed systems, data engineering, cybersecurity, and compliance. Passive DNS, or pDNS, refers to the collection and storage of DNS query and response pairs observed at recursive resolvers, network taps, or forwarders. Unlike authoritative DNS logging, which captures data only from…

In the realm of big-data-powered DNS analytics, the value of insights is often inversely proportional to the time it takes to surface them. Whether the goal is to detect an emerging threat, triage an incident, measure infrastructure behavior, or feed a downstream model, latency in the query path can create operational blind spots and delay…

The need for high-fidelity, low-latency DNS telemetry has grown significantly in modern network environments, where DNS plays a dual role as both a core internet protocol and a rich source of behavioral and security insights. While traditional DNS logging captures queries and responses at a protocol level, DNSTAP provides a more advanced mechanism by recording…