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Nearly Half of Enterprise Networks Show Evidence of DNS Tunneling, According to Infoblox Security Assessments
September 2016 by Marc Jacob
Infoblox Inc. announced results of the Infoblox Security Assessment Report for the second quarter of 2016, which finds that 40 percent—nearly half—of files tested by Infoblox show evidence of DNS tunneling, a significant security threat that can indicate active malware or ongoing data exfiltration within an organization’s network.
Infoblox offers free security assessments to customers and prospective customers, identifying outbound DNS queries inside an organization’s network that are attempting to reach known malicious or suspicious Internet locations (hostname). External threat data from these evaluations is anonymized and aggregated to produce the Infoblox Security Assessment Report.
In the second quarter of 2016, 559 files capturing DNS traffic were uploaded to Infoblox for assessment, coming from 248 customers across a wide range of industries and geographies. Infoblox found 66 percent of the files showed evidence of suspicious DNS activity.
One indicator that stands out in the second quarter report is the prevalence of DNS tunneling. Cybercriminals know that DNS is a well-established and trusted protocol, and have figured out that many organizations do not examine their DNS traffic for malicious activity.
DNS tunneling enables these cybercriminals to insert malware or pass stolen information into DNS queries, creating a covert communication channel that bypasses most firewalls. While there are quasi-legitimate uses of DNS tunneling, many instances of tunneling are malicious. There are also several off-the-shelf tunneling toolkits readily available on the Internet, so hackers don’t always need technical sophistication to mount DNS tunneling attacks. At the same time, DNS tunneling is often part of very sophisticated attacks, including those sponsored or directly managed by nation states. For example, the recently uncovered Project Sauron—a particularly advanced threat that is considered likely to have been sponsored by a government—uses DNS tunneling for data exfiltration.
Among the specific security threats uncovered by Infoblox during the second quarter, ranked by percentage, are:
• Protocol anomalies – 48%
• DNS tunneling – 40%
• Botnets – 35%
• Amplification and reflection traffic – 17%
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) traffic – 14%
• Ransomware – 13%
Infoblox delivers Actionable Network Intelligence through advanced technologies that analyze DNS traffic to help prevent data exfiltration; disrupt advanced persistent threat (APT) and malware communications; and provide context around attacks and infections on the network.
