If you think your organization is too small or too well-protected to suffer a DNS attack, think again.
New figures from network security company EfficientIP suggests almost nine in ten (87 percent) organizations suffered a DNS attack last year. The average cost of one of these attacks hovered around the $950,000 mark.
DNS plays a “pivotal role” in network security, EfficientIP says, both as a threat vector and security objective, with organizations across all industries suffering an average of 7.6 attacks this past year.
With the rise of remote working, attackers set their sights on the cloud. Roughly a quarter of companies suffered a DNS attack that abused a cloud misconfiguration, while DNS attacks resulted in cloud service downtime for almost half.
Criminals have also started stealing more data, as a quarter of organizations reported the theft of sensitive customer data, up from 16 percent a year ago.
The attacker toolkit is diverse and keeps on expanding. Domain hijacking remains the number one method (used more than twice as often as last year), but phishing, malware and traditional DDoS attacks all grew.
The cost of these attacks remains high, but organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the problem. As DNS security is deemed a “critical component” of the network architecture for most respondents, they are turning towards zero trust to improve their cybersecurity posture. Almost half of respondents (43 percent) believe DNS domain deny and allow lists are highly valuable for improving control over access to apps.
Securing network endpoints, tighter threat monitoring and analysis of DNS traffic were listed as the most effective solutions.
