UPDATED 23:21 EDT / OCTOBER 04 2017

INFRA

Survey finds enterprises are overlooking domain name server security

A new survey has found that domain name server security is being overlooked by many enterprises, leaving them wide open to attack.

The survey, commissioned by Infoblox Inc. and undertaken by Dimensional Research, polled 1,000 security and information technology professionals and found that DNS solutions were failing to alert teams of an occurring DNS attack. Nearly a third of professionals doubted their company could defend against the next one.

Only 11 percent of companies were found to have dedicated security teams managing DNS despite three out of 10 companies having been a victim of a DNS attack. Of those attacked, 93 percent reported having suffered downtime as a result, with 40 percent down for an hour or more. In dollar terms, 24 percent of companies suffering from a DNS attack lost more than $100,000 from the attack, and 54 percent lost $50,000 or more.

Suggesting that there may be problems with how DNS monitoring is implemented, of the 71 percent of companies reporting to have real-time DNS attack monitoring, 86 percent said that their solutions failed in first notifying teams that an attack was occurring. A disturbing 20 percent of companies said they were first alerted to attacks by customer complaints.

Attention to DNS attacks is described in the survey as being “reactive rather than proactive,” with 74 percent of companies saying that their primary security focus was antivirus first, while after an attack, 70 percent shifted their security focus to preventing further attacks.

“Our research reveals a gap in the market – while we found that DNS security is one of IT and security professionals’ top three concerns, the vast majority of companies are ill-equipped to defend against DNS attacks,” David Gehringer, principal at Dimensional Research said in a statement. “This is exacerbated by the fact that companies are extremely reactionary when it comes to DNS security, only prioritizing DNS defense once they have been attacked. Unless today’s organizations begin moving to a proactive approach, DDoS attacks such as the one on DNS provider Dyn will become more pervasive.”

Image: christiaancolen/Flickr

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