Secure DNS and DNSSEC – Threat Intelligence in a Drifting E-Threat Landscape

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Threat Intelligence and Secure DNS. Ways to Secure Your Company-Owned DNS Server...

The modern e-threat landscape (threatscape) has, once again, changed. We are no longer besieged by new (and dangerous) malicious strains, but by truisms. The e-thereat scenery is always on the move; no point in denying that.

While in college, I took a Computer Sciences class. I remember sitting there, hearing all about the finer points of bits, bytes, octets, and data arrays, when someone seated in the back popped a question to the teacher: “is there such a thing as an unhackable device?”. The teacher’s answer was mind-blowing: “What would be the point of having something around that can’t be hacked?”

Skipping ahead a bit, years later, I finally understood what the teach meant – how can you ‘do’ if you can’t undo it? How can you tell what’s normal and what’s abnormal if you don’t have a baseline comparison? This zigzagging down memory’s lane does have a point, one that has very much to do with today’s topic, which is Secure DNS and DNNSEC.

So, every armor has its chink and every chink helps us improve that armor; the e-threat landscape is evolving because that what’s it supposed to do.  Now, on to our topic – what is Secure DNS? Why do you need it? What does it do, and, of course, the question that has tormented our minds since the dawn of time – will it blend?  (a roaring shout out to Tom Dickinson for the best 3 A.M videos ever made!). Let’s get started.

DNS vs. Secure DNS. Cybersecurity concerns and predictions.

Inevitably, you will always stumble upon the phrase: “don’t rely on antiquated and/or traditional antivirus”. What I personally find fascinating in all this marketing malarkey is that in the long-forgotten days of yore (basically the Stone Age of computers) malware was cured by an antivirus solution.

True that some malicious variants like worms, trojans, viruses, and any ‘file-based’ malware, would have faced its untimely demise at the hand of an antivirus. However, as the Internet evolved (yeah, I’m really going there), so has malware. Right now, the only people bothering to name, bag, and tag malware are those from MITRE; everybody else is looking for ways to get rid of infections previously thought to be impossible.

Heimdal™ Security is one of the few cybersecurity vendors & developers that go to great lengths to keep track of malicious strains – and no, I’m not saying that because I work there or something. Anyway, the latest fad in data-stealing thingamajigs is the ‘tainting’ of the DNS records or the server itself. If you want to learn more about DNS attacks, I highly encourage you to read Bianca Soare’s article on DNS spoofing.  For now, we’re going to stick to Secure DNS and DNS Security. Before we get to that, here’s a refresher on DNS.

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