[December 16, 2014]

New Research Reveals More than Three Quarters of Organizations Have Suffered a DNS Attack

Seventy-six percent of organizations in the U.S. and U.K. have suffered a Domain Name System (DNS) attack, with 49 percent experiencing one in the past 12 months. The most common DNS threats reported were DDoS (74 percent), DNS exfiltration (46 percent), DNS tunneling (45 percent) and DNS hijacking (33 percent) by those who had suffered an attack. That's according to an independent research study undertaken by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Cloudmark, Inc.

Three hundred IT decision makers were polled across the U.S. and U.K. and, of those who reported suffering a DNS attack, more than half admitted to losing business critical data or revenue. An astounding third of respondents also confirmed they had lost confidential customer information. Despite these serious business implications, 44 percent of those who found it difficult to justify DNS security investment to their company felt it was because their senior management do not see DNS security as an issue and are, in fact, considered barriers to investment. This is in spite of more than half of the IT decision makers polled (55 percent) citing the theft of private or confidential data as a major concern to their organization.

"The survey findings suggest that large organizations are not only inadequately protecting company intellectual property against DNS attack but more needs to be done to help educate businesses on the methods used by DNS attackers," said Neil Cook, chief technology officer at Cloudmark (News - Alert).

"While DDoS threats continue to be a common method of attack to siphon off valuable resources, organizations need to review their security solutions to ensure they can protect against a multitude of other attacks including DNS exfiltration and DNS tunneling, particularly in industries where high-value data is held, such as retail and financial industries. Once an organization's data is in the hands of cyber-criminals, the brand reputation, customers and ultimately revenue of that organization can be severely affected."

Additional findings from the research include:

• Shockingly, in the U.S., 66 percent of respondents have experienced a DNS attack in the past 12 months.
• Of more concern, 23 percent of U.K. respondents admitted they did not know if their organization had ever suffered a DNS attack.
• Retail, distribution and transport firms reported the highest instance of DNS attacks of all vertical industries polled, with 74 percent suffering from an attack in the past 12 months. The industry also revealed itself as the biggest victim of DNS exfiltration attacks (56 percent), with financial services organizations a close second (51 percent) of those who had been victim to an attack.
• Customer retention and brand reputation were the top concerns reported following a DNS attack.

For more information about the impact of DNS threats, please visit: https://www.cloudmark.com/en/register/whitepapers/infonetics-protecting-dns-infrastructure/direct/pdf.

About Cloudmark

Cloudmark is the most trusted leader in security, protecting traffic, data and infrastructure for service providers, enterprises and consumers worldwide. Cloudmark's patented solutions deliver immediate, adaptive and predictive protection from ever-evolving network threats with proven, carrier-grade scalability and operability, assuring business continuity while lowering infrastructure costs. Cloudmark leverages big data analytics from locally collected data and from our Global Threat Network-the world's most comprehensive repository of global threat intelligence. Cloudmark protects more than 120 tier-one customers, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox (News - Alert) and NTT and more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide.

Notes to Editors:

The research polled 300 U.S. and U.K. key IT decision makers in organizations with 1,000+ employees. It covered a variety of verticals including financial services, retail, distribution and transport, IT and manufacturing and production.

Key Terms:

DNS tunneling: The use of DNS to bypass network access or security controls, create reverse tunnels allowing infiltration, or bypass Wi-Fi billing.

DNS exfiltration: The illicit extraction of data via DNS.

DDoS: A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]