As reported by Cisco, Domain Shadowing attacks have risen more that 4x in the last year.  This is a disturbing trend, that concerns all businesses, whether small, medium or large.  DNS Shadowing attacks utilize a business’s reputation to acquire access to important personal or financial information typically by leveraging a subdomain of the business.  For example, an attacker with access to your DNS configuration can setup an spam.yourdomain.com subdomain and route your customers to a website with your look, feel and branding.  From there, your customers will be prompted to login, and expose their credentials and personal information.

This type of threat even affects government agencies, as recently seen with the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  Attackers gained access to the DNS servers and added a subdomain on a foreign server where they gathered login credentials from researchers.   While gathering researchers credentials may not seem frightening, there is potential that these credentials could have been leveraged to access more financially relevant systems.

Incidents like these highlight the need for multi-layered threat protection that protects your servers and your reputation across multiple technologies and externally monitors threats.  At MxToolbox, we offer comprehensive monitoring solutions, like DNS Zone Protect, to help protect our customers from new and emerging threats. DNS Zone Protect gives you peace of mind knowing that changes to your DNS are being externally monitored by MxToolbox.

As your company grows, so does access to your DNS.  Often multiple groups can make changes to DNS: Development, IT Operations, Marketing and even consultants.  Keeping track of who has access and what changes were made or were not made can be a difficult, but important exercise. Servers on subdomains left publicly visible long after the project is over can be used for exploitation by attackers.  Or, someone could inadvertently tell the world about a new product by setting up the subdomain early.  Finally, there is real risk in someone making an unauthorized change to DNS that shuts down critical systems.  Monitoring your DNS for changes is a business-critical task.

MxToolbox recently launched DNS Zone Protect, a monitoring solution for all your DNS, that gives you immediate warning when any change is made to your DNS.  With DNS Zone Protect, you get peace of mind knowing that changes to your DNS are being externally monitored by MxToolbox.

We’ve heard time and again that phishing attacks are the most popular method to obtain access to sensitive company data, but now, phishing is being used to get access to DNS. Lately, a new attack called DNS Shadowing has become increasingly popular, with growth of over 300% in the last year, and it threatens your online reputation.

DNS Shadowing involves phishing or otherwise obtaining access to your DNS accounts. From there, an intruder can create subdomains of your domain and point these entries to their servers without your knowledge. They use these false entries as part of email campaigns to your customers to gather credit cards and financial information. Since these attacks have legitimate appearing sites on URLs that appear to be part of your networks, it appears that you are asking for this information! Your reputation can be used to attack consumers that don’t even have business with you. Talk about a blow to your online reputation!

MxToolbox recently launched DNS Zone Protect, a monitoring solution for all your DNS, that gives you immediate warning when any change is made to your DNS. With DNS Zone Protect, you get peace of mind knowing that changes to your DNS are being externally monitored by MxToolbox.