Malicious DNS activity in enterprises goes up

Dubai / Emirates Business

Infoblox Inc., the network control company, has announced results of the Infoblox Security Assessment Report for the first quarter of 2016, which finds that 83 percent—more than four out of five—of enterprise networks tested by Infoblox show evidence of malicious DNS activity.
Infoblox, an industry leader in securing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, offers free security assessments to customers and prospective customers, identifying DNS queries inside an organization’s network that are attempting to reach known malicious or suspicious domains. External threat data from these evaluations is anonymized and aggregated to produce the Infoblox Security Assessment Report. In the first quarter of 2016, 519 files capturing DNS traffic were uploaded to Infoblox for assessment, coming from 235 customers across a wide range of industries and geographies. Infoblox found 83 percent of the files showed evidence of suspicious DNS activity.
“This result is consistent with what security professionals have been saying for some time: Perimeter defense is no longer sufficient, because almost all large enterprise networks have been compromised to a greater or lesser extent,” said Craig Sanderson, senior director of security products at Infoblox.
Among the specific threats found in files during the first quarter, by percentage, are: Botnets – 54%, Protocol anomalies – 54%, DNS tunneling – 18%, ZeuS malware – 17%, Distributed denial of service (DDoS) traffic – 15%, CryptoLocker ransomware – 13%, Amplification and reflection traffic – 12%, and Heartbleed – 11%.
“The prevalence of these attacks shows the value of DNS in finding threats aimed at disrupting organizations and stealing valuable data, as well as the extent to which organizational infrastructure can be hijacked to mount attacks on third parties,” said Sanderson. “The good news is that DNS is also a powerful enforcement point within the network. When suspicious DNS activity is detected, network administrators and security teams can use this information to quickly identify and remediate infected devices—and can use DNS firewalling as well to prevent malware inside the network from communicating with command-and-control servers.”