DNS: The Internet's Phone Book (and a Hacker's Playground)
How name resolution works — and why attackers love abusing it.
Key takeaways
- DNS translates human-readable hostnames to IP addresses.
- DNS is hierarchical: resolver → root → TLD → authoritative nameserver.
- DNS is largely unauthenticated (DNSSEC adoption is still limited).
- Attackers abuse DNS for C2 (fast-flux), data exfiltration (tunneling), and redirection (spoofing).
DNS is one of the most abused protocols in the attacker's toolkit. Because DNS is almost always allowed outbound, attackers tunnel C2 traffic through DNS queries, exfiltrate data in DNS record payloads, and use fast-flux networks to rapidly rotate C2 infrastructure IP addresses.
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