Cyber criminals are constantly developing increasingly sophisticated and dangerous malware programs. Statistics for the first quarter of 2016 compared to 2015 shows that malware attacks have quadrupled.

Why DNS traffic is important

DNS has an important role in how end users in your enterprise connect to the internet. Each connection made to a domain by the client devices is recorded in the DNS logs. Inspecting DNS traffic between client devices and your local recursive resolver could reveal a wealth of information for forensic analysis.

DNS queries can reveal:

• Botnets/Malware connecting to C&C servers
• What websites visited by an employee
• Which malicious and DGA domains were accessed
• Which dynamic domains (DynDNS) accessed
• DDOS attack detection like NXDomain, phantom domain. random subdomain

Identifying the threats using EventTracker

While parsing each DNS log, we verify each domain accessed against:

• Malicious domain database (updated on regular basis)
• Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA)

Any domain which matches any of the above mentioned criteria warrants attention and an alert is generated along with the client which accessed it, and the geological information of the domain (IP, Country).

Using behavior analysis, EventTracker tracks the volume of connections to each domain accessed in the enterprise. If the volume of traffic to a specific domain is more than average, alert conditions are triggered. When a domain is accessed for the first time, we check the following:

• Is this a dynamic domain?
• Is the domain registered recently or expiring soon?
• Does the domain have a known malicious TLD?

Recent trends show that cyber criminals may create dynamic domains as command and control centers. These domains are activated for a very short duration and then discarded, which makes the above checks even more important.

EventTracker does statistical/threshold monitoring of query, client, record type and error. This helps in detecting many DDOS attacks like NXDOMAIN attack, Phantom domain attack, random sub-domain attack, etc. EventTracker’s monitoring of client DNS settings will help to detect DNS hijacking and generate an alert for anything suspicious, including information about the client as well as its DNS setting. The EventTracker flex dashboard helps in correlating attack detection data and client details, making attack detection simpler.

Monitoring the DNS logs is a powerful way to identify security attacks as they happen in the enterprise, enabling successful blocking of attacks and fixing vulnerabilities.