Adversaries may gather information about the victim's DNS that can be used during targeting. DNS information may include a variety of details, including registered name servers as well as records that outline addressing for a target’s subdomains, mail servers, and other hosts. DNS MX, TXT, and SPF records may also reveal the use of third party cloud and SaaS providers, such as Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, or Zendesk.^[1]

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as querying or otherwise collecting details via DNS/Passive DNS. DNS information may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Search Open Technical Databases).^[2],[3] Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Technical Databases, Search Open Websites/Domains, or Active Scanning), establishing operational resources (ex: Acquire Infrastructure or Compromise Infrastructure), and/or initial access (ex: External Remote Services).

Adversaries may also use DNS zone transfer (DNS query type AXFR) to collect all records from a misconfigured DNS server.^[4],[5],[6]

References

1. Sean Metcalf. (2019, May 9). Sean Metcalf Twitter. Retrieved September 12, 2024.
2. Hacker Target. (n.d.). DNS Dumpster. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
3. CIRCL Computer Incident Response Center. (n.d.). Passive DNS. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
4. SecurityTrails. (2018, March 14). Wrong Bind Configuration Exposes the Complete List of Russian TLD's to the Internet. Retrieved June 5, 2024.
5. CISA. (2016, September 29). DNS Zone Transfer AXFR Requests May Leak Domain Information. Retrieved June 5, 2024.
6. Scanning Alexa's Top 1M for AXFR. (2015, March 29). Retrieved June 5, 2024.

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