A DNS server is an integral part of an AD environment. Simple yet crucial activities are accomplished using DNS servers, such as authenticating, searching for computers, and identifying domain controllers. But attackers know there are a lot of loopholes in DNS that they can exploit. And, they often already know about these vulnerabilities. In this blog, you will learn how attackers can abuse.
Have you ever typed in a website’s address and ended up somewhere completely different? Or received emails from what appears to be a familiar company, but with suspicious links that lead to unfamiliar pages? These scenarios may be the result of DNS spoofing, a type of cyber-attack that can leave your sensitive information vulnerable. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what DNS spoofing is, how it works, who is at risk, and most importantly – how you can prevent it.
A Domain Name System (DNS) is a protocol that translates human-readable domain names/URLs—like favoritewebsite.com—into IP addresses that computers can read—like 135.24.56.98. DNS servers handle tens of thousands of queries that transfer minute bits of data between devices, systems, and servers—which makes DNS an attractive and easily exploitable vector for hackers (Cloudns.net).
The idea behind “SPoF,” or “Single Point of Failure,” is that if one part of a system fails, then the entire system fails. It’s not desirable. In IT and security circles, if a system or application can be disrupted or degraded severely by the failure of just one component or subcomponent, then we usually deem the design to have a flaw.
The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names into IP addresses. Every device and website has an IP address that other devices, websites, and online services use to communicate with it. IP addresses are a string of numbers usually formatted as 000.000.000.000. However, we use domain names since people can’t easily remember these numbers.
When your web browser accesses a website, it needs to first translate the friendly URL (such as Netwrix.com) to the public server IP address of the server that hosts that website. This is known as a DNS lookup. Traditional DNS is unencrypted, unlike modern HTTPS web traffic that’s almost entirely secured via HTTPS these days.
In this blog post, we outline the research our Threat Intelligence team has undertaken into this new attack vector. A new LOLBins tactic for executing payloads through PowerShell was released by Alh4zr3d, a security researcher, on Twitter in September 2022. In the tweet, the security researcher recommended that organisations stay away from IEX and Invoke-WebRequest when using PowerShell commands and, as a substitute, host a text record with their payload on a domain.
