The Domain Name System continues to be a foundational part of how the internet works, and that won’t be really changing any time soon. But as cloud networking grows, attackers continue to use DNS in harmful ways to lure people into cybersecurity traps, and  security around DNS needs to grow within the cloud environment.

“We’re seeing more of an uptake in people understanding that DNS can be used to actually deliver security,” said Meg Diaz (pictured), manager of product marketing for the Security Business Group at Cisco Systems Inc. “[We’re] still educating people about how they can add additional layers of security to their environment — and DNS being really one of them.”

Diaz spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. They discussed DNS security threats and and how DNS can also help secure networks. (* Disclosure below.)

DNS attacks threaten cloud security, Cisco Umbrella monitors

As education continues to grow around DNS security threats among enterprises, Cisco Umbrella is a product that Cisco acquired in 2015 to help monitor security in the cloud network environment — including DNS threats. For example, attackers may tweak a URL so that unsuspecting people click on links that look like they are from a trusted service like PayPal.

“There’s a number of different methods that we’re using in [Umbrella] to detect that,” Diaz stated. “We’ll look at the way that the domain is actually written. … We look at the structure of the wording — and sometimes if you can see little characters, or letters, or numbers that are off … and we can detect that that’s happening.”

Umbrella also looks at the infrastructure behind the domain: what the IP address is and other activities that are happening at that IP address, according to Diaz.

“We saw a PayPal domain that was supposedly a U.K. PayPal domain, but it was actually hosted on a bulletproof hosting site — which no legitimate PayPal … domain, would be hosted on. So things like that that we’re able to detect,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco DevNet sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE