Welcome back to Part 4 of our definitive domain cybersecurity checklist, covering DNS servers! Here, as always, EBRAND’s CTO Anouar Adlani delivers some hard-earned industry insights about another part of your domain cybersecurity infrastructure.
Just to recap, so far we’ve covered the following:
- Part 1: Registrar access control
- Part 2: Domain operations management
- Part 3: Domain name protection
We’re tackling DNS servers today, understanding the threat landscape around this crucial technical infrastructure. Beyond that, we’ll outline and the best solutions to keep your business safe and effective online.
What are DNS servers?
Domain Name System servers form a fundamental piece of digital infrastructure for your business, just as important as a brick-and-mortar store’s doors, signs, or parking lot. At the functional level, Domain Name System servers link your IP addresses, websites, and email servers. Your clients and colleagues place their trust in your domains, and DNS servers help uphold this trust through safe navigation. Any interruptions to this navigation will slow your business down, impeding your revenue. Worse, DNS server hacks and poisonings threaten to throw your business into digital chaos.
The risks of vulnerable DNS servers
As we’ve established, DNS servers form a highway between your domains, websites, and emails. Digital highwaymen target this infrastructure to exploit your traffic for their own gain. DNS attacks typically aim to redirect, block, or steal from your traffic, at your company’s expense.
Zone transfer and man-in-the-middle attacks
In man-in-the-middle attacks, hackers intercept requests in vulnerable Domain Name System servers, potentially siphoning valuable information like payment details and passwords. Cybercriminals also target misconfigured and vulnerable DNS servers for unauthorized zone transfers and data exfiltration, potentially threatening massive leaks of proprietary information and customer data.
With man-in-the-middle attacks, and many kinds of DNS Server risks, legitimate businesses don’t even learn about the vulnerability until after the attacker wreaks havoc with their traffic, stealing data and funds from innocent victims.
DDoS attacks and downtimes
Website downtime creates holes in your cybersecurity, and hackers exploit this concept by targeting your DNS servers with DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks. These attacks coordinate teams of bots and hackers to overwhelm your servers with a tide of requests, submerging your DNS and freezing your websites. Successful DDoS attacks inflict costly downtimes and further hacking risks.
DDoS attacks inflict panic and uncertainty on their victims, while lowering defenses so that cybercriminals can infiltrate. Businesses must prepare for these kinds of attacks, and one proactive strategy simply involves learning about cyberattacks and how to solve them. Discover eight common types of domain attacks in our guide right here.
Spoofing and redirects
DNS servers act as branded signage, taking visitors safely to your outlets. However, hackers can take control of this signage, leading visitors off the beaten path into uncharted territory online. When cybercriminals hack DNS servers, they often redirect journeys towards phishing websites and malware downloads, spreading cyberattacks in your brand’s name.
Businesses must therefore secure their DNS servers to protect their brands, their team, and their clients. You’ll find a list of effective DNS server security measures below.
Techniques to improve your DNS server security
Now we know the risks to your DNS servers, it’s time to explore some solutions. Below, we’ve listed four effective cybersecurity tactics from our CTO.
1. Diverse server topology and dispersed geography
When it comes to protecting your Domain Name System server, there’s safety in numbers. Secure businesses set up at least three authoritative DNS servers, geographically separated into different data centers. Setting up a strategic network of servers, rather than one point of weakness, makes it far harder to overwhelm your capacity. Businesses can then distribute their servers on distinct address blocks and extensions (TLDs), so that cybercriminals don’t know which targets to attack. Ultimately, diversifying your server topology and geography minimizes disruptions, enhances reliability, and creates a secure, stable environment for your business to flourish online.
2. Anycast DNS
Setting up an Anycast DNS server uses the same principle of diversification to reinforce your infrastructure. Increasing the quantity of DNS servers improves your security, but Anycast delivers an improved quality to complement your strategy. Conventional unicast connects a single server to a query, but Anycast DNS allows a network of servers to answer a query with whichever node proves most optimal at the time. This flexibility creates a fast, dynamic DNS solution that maximizes availability for even your most sensitive domain. Anycast DNS mitigates geographic outages, improves your website performance, and strengthens your domain cybersecurity on a global scale.
3. IPv4 + IPv6
Compatibility fuels effective business transactions, whether we’re talking payment compatibility at store checkouts, or IP compatibility on your DNS servers. When it comes to DNS, security-minded businesses ensure that their servers stay compatible with the two main types of IP address format, namely IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 uses eight sets of numbers to document its digital addresses, compared with IPv4’s four sets, but both versions still find widespread use across the internet. Checking that your server supports each version helps you unlock the inherent cybersecurity features in IPv4 and IPv6, while ensuring that you don’t lose any valuable traffic from incompatible IPs.
4. Monitoring
Monitoring presents another theme echoing throughout different forms of cybersecurity, as real-time information delivers the details you’ll need to protect your businesses online. Cybersecure businesses setup multiple channels of DNS monitoring, including automatic queries, response time analysis, record checks, zone synchronization monitoring, and more. Monitoring often provides the first early warning before serious website downtime, or a cyberattack. This kind of information helps you react fast to secure your ecommerce, protect your team, and minimize the impact on your client base. In general, updates about the health of your infrastructure supports the kind of peace-of-mind necessary for successful ecommerce.
Conclusion: How DNS servers secure your business
To summarize, we’ve covered four foundational steps that help your business build robust and high-performing Domain Name System servers. Diversifying your server quality and quantity, while creating compatible and regularly monitored assets, provides comprehensive server cybersecurity. This helps deter cyberattackers, and ensure that your website visitors navigate from A to B without a hitch. As part of an effective Corporate Domain Management strategy, you’ll secure your servers and capitalize on your brand’s online presence.
Domain cybersecurity creates high-achieving teams and lucrative businesses, as we aim to establish throughout this checklist. Thanks again for reading, and stay tuned for Part 5, on DNS zones. There, we’ll tackle fundamental challenges like domain name content and configuration, along with the powerful suite of DNSSEC. We’ll see you there!
