Problem: DNS Risks

DNS: Widely trusted but sadly not trustworthy.

The Domain Name System, or DNS, was created in 1983, a much simpler and more trusting period in computing, to serve as directory assistance between a web site domain name (www.yourname.com, for example) and an IP address. Flash forward to 2010, when cyber fraud, attacks and crime are all on the rise, and this trust has eroded considerably.

In fact, many high-profile companies like CheckFree, Comcast, Baidu, Twitter, and even the international oversight body for domain names itself, ICANN, have become victims of DNS hijacking within the past couple years.

When this occurs, cyber criminals redirect a domain to a fraudulent Internet host. By hijacking an enterprise’s DNS, hackers can gain access to everything stored and shared within an organization: vital data like financial and customer information, passwords, e-mails and IMs proprietary documents and more. And these attacks affect more than just domains on the Web – they can impact all traffic and transactions throughout an entire extended enterprise.

In January 2010, a report prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “In the Crossfire – Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber-War,” polled 600 IT and security professionals across seven industry sectors in 14 countries. The report found that 57 percent of those polled had experienced DNS poisoning attacks, and most of those were repeated on a monthly basis. Furthermore, according to the respondents, the cost of downtime incurred from a network infrastructure attack on their organizations is more than six million dollars a day.

In the CheckFree hijacking, hackers redirected CheckFree customers to a web address that installed malware during the electronic bill pay process. CheckFree’s 24 million customers were at serious risk. The hackers could have used their malware not just to access CheckFree users’ vital data, but also to swindle information from the financial industry’s hundreds of transaction partners. By exploiting connections through all levels of an extended enterprise, cyber criminals continually gain access to the core transactions that facilitate business.

IID’s internal team of experts, industry-leading proprietary systems, and vast network of industry relationships combine to ensure that these extended enterprise communication channels are being monitored – and threats mitigated – in order to secure customer Internet presence and authenticate connections.