DNS - DNS and Cyber Attacks: An Expert Shares His Views

Since it’s so fundamental to the Internet’s operations, Domain Name System or “DNS” – the technology works in the background to connect computers to Web sites through IP addresses – also is an entry point for increasingly bold and resourceful cybercriminals, an expert in the field told TMCnet in an interview.

 

According to Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar – a Sterling, Va.-based company that delivers addressing, interoperability, and infrastructure services worldwide to communication service providers, enterprises, associations, governments and regulatory agencies – there are two major vectors at issue.

 

The first of those is a distributed denial of service attack.

 

“Once miscreants understand that DNS is key to allowing applications to work on the Internet – if DNS is down, you cannot translate IP address to a domain, so there’s no ability to go to a Web site – once they recognized that, they also realized that instead of launching attacks on enormous resources that a lot of people have, with lots of Web servers and entire amounts of bandwidth … easy thing would be to go after DNS,” he said.

 

Joffe – a fiber security expert who has advised the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI and testified before Congress on Internet security – told TMCnet during a podcast that’s available here, in The DNS Zone, that the second major vector is the botnet, which also is used to launch attacks on DNS.

 

During the interview, Joffe also discussed what businesses can do to protect themselves against attacks, including areas such as software systems, infrastructure and operations.

 

Some of Joffe’s most interesting comments come during his response to a question about the “next wave” of Internet security risks – and how we can protect ourselves.

 

Listen now.