As the threat landscape grows more sophisticated, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are continuously searching for innovative ways to safeguard their organizations. Yet one of the most potent tools in their arsenal remains underutilized – DNS (domain name systems).

But first, let’s first talk about the important role DNS plays in every network. Domains are the first thing users, devices, and workloads query to communicate with resources across the internet. DNS is the phone book of the Internet, resolving domains such as www.*anydomainname*.com to IP addresses that computers and servers can understand.

While often relegated to a purely functional role, DNS offers unparalleled opportunities for preemptive defense against cyberattacks. When harnessed correctly, DNS is the first line of defense. It can stop attacks before they succeed, disrupt command-and-control (C2) communications and data exfiltration, and provide invaluable insights for security operations centers (SOCs) during incident response. DNS in fact can also extend to secure every part of your network, from endpoints to cloud workloads and IoT/OT.

In fact, in 2020, the NSA started a pilot on protective DNS (they used the term “secure DNS” at the time) and concluded that they were able to reduce the ability of 92% of malware attacks to successfully deploy malware on a given network.

Evolution Of AI-Powered Cyber Threats

The majority of security solutions today are right of “Boom” — reacting only after an attack has happened. When an initial infection happens (patient zero), security teams analyze the malware, domain or exploit and generate a signature or indicator of compromise (IOC) based on the attack. This signature or IOC is distributed to endpoint detection tools, antivirus solutions or intrusion detection systems, and shows up in VirusTotal and OSINT (open source intelligence) tools. The rest of the industry can now block this attack, because of this first victim or infection.

The rise of AI in the hands of cybercriminals has dramatically reshaped the threat landscape. Threat actors now leverage AI to:

• Generate polymorphic malware: AI-driven malware continuously evolves its code to evade signature-based detection, making traditional security tools ineffective against rapidly morphing threats.
• Automate phishing campaigns: AI crafts highly personalized phishing emails and generates fake websites that mimic legitimate ones with alarming accuracy, increasing the success rate of attacks.
• Scale malicious infrastructure: AI-powered tools allow cybercriminals to rapidly create new domains, IP addresses, and hosting services, making detection and takedown efforts far more challenging. Registered domain generation algorithms (RDGAs) are a programmatic mechanism that allows threat actors to create many domain names at once or over time and register them for use in their infrastructure.

As a result, every threat and malware variant may be unique and highly targeted, forcing security teams to combat hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of patient zeros. Existing solutions simply cannot keep up–it would be like playing a cybersecurity game of whack-a-mole. This shift necessitates a different approach to cybersecurity.

DNS as a Preemptive Cybersecurity Weapon