DNS attacks cost global governments an average of $7 million each year, a new study says

• The organizations in this sector suffer an average of 12 DNS attacks per year, costing over half a million dollars each.
• The typical DNS attack takes over seven hours for government organizations to mitigate.

DNS attack is a type of attack in which attackers target servers by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the domain name system. The attacks on DNS can be executed in various ways which include, but are not limited to, DoS, DNS spoofing and Reflected attacks.

Given the variety of ways a domain can be attacked, the threat to organizations in the government sector has increased manifold.

According to new research from EfficientIP, the government sector is losing nearly $7 million, on average, from DNS attacks each year. The organizations in this sector suffer an average of 12 DNS attacks per year, costing over half a million dollars each.

Purpose of DNS attacks

DNS traffic is used by cybercriminals for a range of purposes. This includes:

• To launch C2 communication with infected corporate clients
• To attempt redirection to phishing sites
• Data exfiltration

Major impact

• Downtime of in-house applications and data theft following DNS-related attacks.
• Downtime in cloud services.
• Compromised websites also put data at risk.
• Sensitive information or IP being stolen via DNS.

Worth noting

The typical DNS attack takes over seven hours for government organizations to mitigate. In a way, this gives attackers a huge potential to steal sensitive personal and financial data.

“With an increasing number of government services moving online, hackers have more points of attack to exploit than ever before. When 91% of malware uses DNS, analysis of DNS transactions is vital for uncovering these dangerous threats hidden in network traffic. In particular, the detection of data exfiltration via DNS requires visibility and analytics on transactions from the client to the destination domain,” comments David Williamson, CEO of Efficient IP.