Every day we discover new vulnerabilities in our systems, cracks in the fence the adversaries take advantage of to get into your organization and wreak havoc. Understanding what you have in your environment (e.g., types of devices, systems equipment, etc.) is very important in order to make sure the controls in place are working and more importantly, keeping up with the threat landscape.
As companies responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with remote work, cybercriminals increased their social engineering and ransomware attack methodologies. Ransomware, malicious code that automatically downloads to a user’s device and locks it from further use, has been rampant since the beginning of March 2020. According to a 2020 report by Bitdefender, ransomware attacks increased by seven times when compared year-over-year to 2019.
Monitoring all DNS requests in your network, including those that were blocked by (e.g., by a firewall) is a great way to increase visibility, enforce compliance and detect threats. A common problem with collecting DNS logs is that DNS server logs are notoriously hard to parse. Also, parsing only the logs of your DNS servers leaves a blind spot when it comes to usage of, or the attempt to use, an external DNS server like Google's 8.8.8.8.
