Corrupted DNS Resolution Paths: The Rise of a Malicious Resolution Authority

We study and document an important development in how attackers are using Internet resources: the creation of malicious DNS resolution paths. In this growing form of attack, victims are forced to use rogue DNS servers for all resolution. To document the rise of this “second secret authority” on the Internet, we studied instances of aberrant DNS resolution on a university campus. We found dozens of viruses that corrupt resolution paths, and noted that hundreds of URLs discovered per week performed drive-by alterations of host DNS settings. We used the rogue servers discovered in this analysis to document numerous live incidents on the university network. To measure this problem on the larger Internet, we generated DNS requests to most of IPv4, using a unique label query for each request. We found 17 million hosts responding, and further tracked the resolution path they used to reach our NS. Unable to find plausible harmless explanations for such a large number of open recursive ho...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: NDSS
• Authors: David Dagon, Niels Provos, Christopher P. Lee, Wenke Lee
• Keywords: Computer Networks, DNS Resolution, Malicious Dns Resolution, NDSS 2008, Resolution Path