Category: DNS Forensics

The growing sophistication of cyber threats leveraging DNS as a covert communication and attack vector has driven the need for more advanced detection methods. Traditional signature-based or rule-based approaches are often insufficient against the dynamic, evasive behaviors exhibited by modern attackers. In response, machine learning techniques have become integral to DNS forensics and security. Among…

Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, is the backbone routing protocol that governs how packets traverse the complex web of autonomous systems that make up the internet. It determines the best paths for data to travel between networks based on routing policies and path attributes. Although BGP is critical for the internet’s operation, it was never…

Advanced Persistent Threats, or APTs, represent some of the most formidable adversaries in the cybersecurity landscape. Characterized by their stealth, resourcefulness, and prolonged engagement, APT actors often use sophisticated techniques to maintain a foothold within targeted networks over extended periods. One of the most critical yet often underestimated channels that APTs exploit is the Domain…

Passive DNS is a powerful resource in the arsenal of digital forensics, particularly when it comes to analyzing and reconstructing the activities of malware campaigns. By recording and archiving DNS resolutions as they occur across the internet, passive DNS databases provide a historical view of domain-to-IP mappings that can be queried retrospectively. Unlike authoritative DNS…

DNS tunneling detection exercises represent a critical battleground between red teams and blue teams, simulating real-world scenarios where adversaries abuse the Domain Name System to create covert communication channels within compromised networks. These exercises are vital for preparing defenders to recognize and respond to threats that deliberately exploit one of the most trusted and under-monitored…

In the domain of DNS forensics, anomaly detection plays a central role in identifying potential threats such as data exfiltration, malware command-and-control activity, domain generation algorithms, and DNS tunneling. However, anomaly detection systems are notoriously susceptible to generating false positives, where benign traffic is mistakenly flagged as suspicious. Quantifying false positives in DNS anomaly detection…

The exposure of open DNS resolvers within corporate assets presents a significant and often underappreciated risk to enterprise security. An open resolver is a DNS server that accepts and processes recursive queries from any IP address on the internet, not just from trusted internal clients. While intended for ease of access in certain legitimate contexts,…

In the field of DNS forensics, the ability to track phishing kits through subdomain enumeration has emerged as a critical technique for disrupting malicious campaigns and understanding attacker infrastructure. Phishing kits are pre-packaged collections of scripts and templates that replicate the appearance of legitimate websites, designed to steal user credentials, payment information, and other sensitive…

DNS record Time-To-Live (TTL) manipulation has emerged as a sophisticated anti-forensic tactic employed by threat actors to complicate detection, analysis, and response efforts. In the context of DNS forensics, TTL values, which dictate how long a DNS resolver should cache a response before querying the authoritative server again, provide crucial context for tracking domain usage…

In the realm of DNS forensics, access to comprehensive, timely, and reliable DNS data sources is critical for investigators seeking to track malicious activities, uncover threat infrastructure, and build actionable intelligence. Public DNS data sources offer an invaluable supplement to internal logs, providing broader historical and real-time visibility into domain resolution behaviors across the internet.…