We face hundreds of decisions every day. From choosing vendors to partner with to equipping employees for handling hybrid work, decisions are the everyday work of our lives. Teams depend on their leaders to choose wisely.
One of the toughest decisions that modern organizations make is about how to secure their investments, assets, data, and more from cyber criminals. Securing organizations isn’t getting easier – it’s getting more difficult. As organizations become more distributed, the risk goes up and the decisions about to protect an organization at scale only multiply.
Using data to make decisions – particularly when it comes to making the right choice about how to secure what powers our businesses – is key to reducing risk to your organization. DNS data can be a key part of understanding how to shape your security strategy, as well as helping to prevent common DNS attacks.
The data on the damage of cyberthreats is daunting
Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that expects global cybercrime will reach $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025. They went on to note that “If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime…would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.”
The costs to businesses specifically? The National Bureau of Economic Research wrote, “After suffering a breach of customers’ personal data, the average attacked firm loses 1.1 percent of its market value and experiences a 3.2 percentage point drop in its year-on-year sales growth rate.”
Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.
Cybercrime Magazine
But preparing for and protecting against cybersecurity threats can feel like fighting an invisible, unknown enemy. You know the threat is present and that anything is possible, but it’s unclear that the real and immediate danger might be. This makes data-gathering and analysis an important aspect of modern cybersecurity. And when it comes to getting eyes on the threats facing your network, it makes sense to start with DNS data.
Using DNS data to defend your network
Domain name server (DNS) data can give more insight into what kind of attacks are being staged and where. Because DNS is used to point an incoming website domain toward the IP address of the server, DNS records hold information about every single website on the internet.
Ultimately, using your own DNS data records will uncover information about the servers your network users are connecting to and information about unusual DNS activity occurring in your network. With that information, you can configure your recursive DNS servers’ policies and limit risk by restricting or filtering the kinds of websites users can visit, the kinds of files they can download, or the kinds of on-network activity that gets permitted.
The Cisco Umbrella global network handles 200+ billion DNS requests daily, and that data reveals a lot about most-seen attacks across the internet, as well as the evolution and growing sophistication of cyberthreats.
You can use our most recent DNS data analysis to help shape your security strategy. Download our new report – 2022 DNS Discoveries – to find out what you need to know about internet-based threats and how to stop them.
