Securing Dns For Windows

[MGadAllah]

Regardless of the attack on your DNS infrastructure, you need to take precautions to thwart off these attacks before it is too late.

DNS is a rather simple service, but protecting it can make or break your entire network infrastructure. Even though DNS is a simple database of names and numbers, an attacker can take full advantage of the information that they can glean from compromising the database. Some attacks can be to gather information from your database, only to use that information against you as they build a structure of what your network looks like. Other attacks will put information into your database, in an attempt to have your DNS servers perform name resolutions that they would normally not perform. Regardless of the attack on your DNS infrastructure, you need to take precautions to thwart off these attacks before it is too late.

DNS Basics

DNS, Domain Naming Service, is a service that resolves IP addresses to names. The key here is to understand which names we are talking about. As the name indicates, DNS stores domain related information. For example, Active Directory uses DNS to store domain names and all of the computer names for the computers on the network. If your domain is named policy.org and the first domain controller in your domain is PDC1, you will have entries in DNS similar to that:

Figure 1 DNS entries for the first computers in your Active Directory domain

Notice in the previous figure that not only is there an entry for PDC1, there is an associated IP address for PDC1 of X.X.X.X. The reason there is an IP address associated with the name is that your computer and other services on the network don

[rubab]

Thanks a lot