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You may have heard of notorious malware variants like Zloader using DNS tunneling for command and control (C2). Instead of making regular web requests, this malware uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to communicate with its C2 servers, and this allows malicious traffic to bypass network security, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS).

But wait, DNS doesn’t support arbitrary data transfer like HTTP, does it? Well, it doesn’t, but DNS tunneling is a workaround for that. In this post, we break down DNS tunneling for you, including how it works and how to detect it – both from within an organization’s network and from outside it. 

For cybersecurity researchers, the DNS hides a treasure trove of data. It offers insights to identify malicious domains, map attacker infrastructure, detect fast flux, and identify typosquatting domains. But it also requires knowing where to look and what to analyze. 

In this post, we cover different the best DNS lookup tools for different types of lookups and what types of investigations they can help with. 

As an organization’s internet infrastructure grows, it requires more and more configuration, setup, and decision-making—from selecting a reliable name server to determining the right types of DNS records and setting the appropriate time-to-live (TTL) values. One of those decisions is whether or not to create a wildcard DNS record, a feature that most hosting providers, registrars, and DNS providers offer.

In this post, we discuss what a wildcard DNS record is, how it helps, and any risks associated with it.

Identifying malicious infrastructure, implementing blocklists, analyzing IP or domain reputation — all of these (and many other) tasks rely on mapping fully qualified domain names (FQDNs, or so called “complete domains”) to IPs and IPs to FQDNs. These mappings are crucial not only for network security analysis but also for troubleshooting and even basic website administration. 

There are lookup tools that can let you obtain the IP address that resolves to the FQDN (i.e., FQDN to IP or forward lookup tools) or retrieve a list of domains resolving to an IP address (i.e., IP to FQDN also known as reverse lookup tools). If you want to dig deeper—go back in time, if you will—there are also tools that let you perform historical FQDN to IP and IP to FQDN lookups based on passive DNS data. From there, you can create a timeline of the resource’s resolutions. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to do all of these. If you want to follow along and do the queries yourself, make sure to sign up for a free account to start using the tools we will be demonstrating.

We are thrilled to announce that several of our APIs have been upgraded to include new data points, namely, wildcard and active. In particular, both fields are now optional output parameters for Reverse IP API, Reverse DNS API, Reverse MX API, and Reverse NS API. Our newly launched DNS Chronicle API, meanwhile, has a wildcard field as part of its default output format.

Abstract

This document outlines the setup of a PostgreSQL database on Ubuntu Linux to efficiently manage and query WHOISXMLAPI’s Premium DNS database. Designed to store and analyze billions of DNS records, this database will handle large-scale data ingestion, facilitate rapid data retrieval, and support extensive analytical operations. PostgreSQL’s robust performance, scalability, and support for advanced indexing make it ideal for managing DNS data, while its compatibility with open-source tools provides a flexible environment for future scaling and data processing.

Abstract

Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database designed for handling massive volumes of data across many commodity servers without a single point of failure. Its decentralized nature and robust architecture make it particularly well-suited for applications that require high availability, fault tolerance, and horizontal scalability. Cassandra is engineered to handle very large datasets, supporting billions of records with ease, making it an ideal choice for organizations dealing with large-scale, real-time applications such as time-series data, IoT data, and customer logs. Through its use of a partitioned architecture and the ability to add nodes seamlessly as data grows, Cassandra offers an efficient means of managing big data with low latency and high throughput.

We are excited to announce that the Standard and Premium DNS Database files from DNS Database Download are now enriched with two new columns, namely, wildcard and active. These additions allow you to determine if a DNS record is part of a wildcard entry and check if a domain name or subdomain is active based on its most recent resolution status.