Summary
Beyond the Firewall: How Attackers Weaponize Your DNS
For many IT professionals, DNS is the internet’s invisible plumbing, historically managed by a “guy with a Unix beard in the basement,” as Infoblox educator Josh Kuo recalled on the Defenders Log podcast. But this foundational, often overlooked, protocol has become a primary vector for sophisticated cyberattacks.
In the interview, Kuo shared a jaw-dropping story of a software company that was unknowingly leaking intellectual property. Attackers weren’t breaching firewalls; they were using DNS tunneling. By encoding stolen data into a stream of seemingly normal DNS queries, they exfiltrated sensitive files right past traditional defenses. The malicious queries themselves carried the data out of the network.
This technique is effective because security teams universally trust and permit DNS traffic (port 53), creating a massive blind spot. Attackers exploit this trust not only to steal data but also to establish command-and-control (C2) channels, using DNS responses to send instructions to malware already inside a network.
The solution is to stop seeing DNS as a simple utility and start treating it as a critical security layer. By implementing Protective DNS services that use threat intelligence to inspect and block malicious queries, organizations can stop these attacks before a harmful connection is ever made. As Kuo emphasizes, understanding how DNS can be abused is the first step to defending it.
Full episode of The Defender’s Log here:
An Educator’s Guide to DNS Threats with Josh Kuo | The Defender’s Log
TL;DR
- DNS is an Overlooked Attack Vector: Because DNS traffic (port 53) must be allowed through firewalls for the in
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