Four out of Five Enterprise Networks Show Evidence of Malicious DNS Activity, According to Infoblox Security Assessments

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 19th June, 2016—Infoblox Inc., the network control company, today announced results of the Infoblox Security Assessment Report for the first quarter of 2016, which finds that 83 percent—more than four out of five—of enterprise networks tested by Infoblox show evidence of malicious DNS activity.

Infoblox, an industry leader in securing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, offers free security assessments to customers and prospective customers, identifying DNS queries inside an organization’s network that are attempting to reach known malicious or suspicious domains. External threat data from these evaluations is anonymized and aggregated to produce the Infoblox Security Assessment Report.

In the first quarter of 2016, 519 files capturing DNS traffic were uploaded to Infoblox for assessment, coming from 235 customers across a wide range of industries and geographies. Infoblox found 83 percent of the files showed evidence of suspicious DNS activity.

“This result is consistent with what security professionals have been saying for some time: Perimeter defense is no longer sufficient, because almost all large enterprise networks have been compromised to a greater or lesser extent,” said Craig Sanderson, senior director of security products at Infoblox. “The new mandate for enterprise security teams is to quickly discover and remediate threats inside the network, before they cause significant damage.”

Among the specific threats found in files during the first quarter, by percentage, are:

• Botnets – 54%
• Protocol anomalies – 54%
• DNS tunneling – 18%
• ZeuS malware – 17%
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) traffic – 15%
• CryptoLocker ransomware – 13%
• Amplification and reflection traffic – 12%
• Heartbleed – 11%

“The prevalence of these attacks shows the value of DNS in finding threats aimed at disrupting organizations and stealing valuable data, as well as the extent to which organizational infrastructure can be hijacked to mount attacks on third parties,” said Sanderson. “The good news is that DNS is also a powerful enforcement point within the network. When suspicious DNS activity is detected, network administrators and security teams can use this information to quickly identify and remediate infected devices—and can use DNS firewalling as well to prevent malware inside the network from communicating with command-and-control servers.”

Infoblox delivers actionable network intelligence through advanced technologies that analyze DNS traffic to help prevent data exfiltration; disrupt advanced persistent threat (APT) and malware communications; and provide context around attacks and infections on the network.