Nearly 75% of companies suffer downtime due to DNS attacks

Global market intelligence firm IDC has released the 2022 Global DNS Threat Report, which suggests that hybrid working and cloud migration during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in DNS-related attacks, with application downtime and data theft being major consequences.

The report, sponsored by security vendor efficientIP and compiled from interviews with over 1000 global organizations with more than 500 employees, also revealed that 88% of organizations experienced DNS-related attacks in the previous year, with an average of seven per responding company.

These include DNS tunneling, phishing, malware, zero-day exploits, DDoS attacks, DNS hijacking, and cloud misconfiguration abuse. All categories saw an increase in attacks over the previous year.

Because firewalls are configured to allow list traffic, IT teams frequently overlook the DNS layer. However, it is a popular attack vector because of its near-ubiquity in modern IT environments and insecure design. According to the NCSC, almost all cyber-attacks use DNS during their lifecycle.

According to IDC, the risks associated with DNS have only increased during the pandemic. It also stated that hybrid work models had introduced new challenges to IT teams. With the removal of the perimeter, both the attack surface and cloud usage have increased significantly.

According to survey results, the number and size of attacks remain very high, and cyber-criminals are leveraging vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations to gain access to networks, disrupt operations, and steal data.

70% of respondents reported application downtime due to DNS attacks, which affected both in-house and cloud-based applications. A quarter (24%) of customer data or sensitive IP was stolen. According to the report, this contributed to an average cost of $942,000 per attack. This is nearly identical to the $950,000 stated in last year’s report.