Uncover Hidden Threats with DNS Risk Assessment

Even with multiple security tools in place, a surprising amount of suspicious DNS activity goes unnoticed. A DNS Risk Assessment exposes what lurks underneath: malicious domains, tunneling behavior, certificate issues, misconfigurations, shadow IT, risky applications, and other hidden risks buried deep within DNS traffic. The deepest risks in your network rarely announce themselves – but DNS always leaves a trail.

A DNS Risk Assessment That Changed Everything

During a recent DNS Risk Assessment, a customer submitted just one day of DNS traffic for analysis. The report quickly surfaced several findings they hadn’t been aware of at all: DNS queries linked to phishing and malware domains, multiple certificate weaknesses — and one pattern in particular that stood out. A series of unusually long, repetitive subdomain queries appeared during off-hours, a classic early indicator of DNS tunneling. While small in volume, this type of activity is often used to test whether data can be pushed out unnoticed, and it wasn’t something the customer had ever seen before. It was a clear reminder that DNS often reveals the earliest signs of risk long before they appear anywhere else.

This customer is not alone. A 2025 Forrester Study found that 95% of organizations experienced DNS-related attacks or vulnerabilities in the past year, with phishing and malware among the most common threats observed at the DNS layer. DNS tunneling, the technique hinted at in this customer’s assessment, has been reported by 26% of organizations, suggesting that the off-hours, long-subdomain activity uncovered in this customer’s network reflects a broader attacker behavior. In response, 85% of security leaders consider regular DNS audits critical, and 91% are prioritizing stronger DNS monitoring and analysis, highlighting the growing importance of DNS Risk Assessments as a first step in understanding and reducing exposure.

How EfficientIP DNS Risk Assessment Works

One of the most valuable aspects of our DNS Risk Assessment is how simple and non-intrusive it is. The process starts with capturing real DNS traffic, typically a standard tcpdump from one of your DNS resolvers or forwarders. There is no installation, no agent, and no disruption to your production environment. Once the capture is securely uploaded, the assessment tool processes the data and generates a clear, interactive report tailored to your organization.

Behind the scenes, the analysis uses EfficientIP’s global DNS Threat Intelligence, machine learning models, statistical techniques, and passive DNS data. It correlates patterns across billions of DNS records to identify unusual behavior, suspicious domains, and signals that may indicate misconfigurations or security risks.

An EfficientIP expert then reviews the findings to ensure accuracy, highlight what matters most, and guide you through the results. This context helps validate what is normal in your environment and points directly to areas that need attention.The outcome is clear, evidence-based visibility. You see exactly what happened inside your DNS traffic, which devices and IP addresses were involved, which IOCs were triggered, where anomalies or risks may exist and the overall risk score. Because the report is structured into clear sections with explanations and visualizations, teams can easily understand the findings and prioritize the next steps.

What DNS Traffic Analysis Reveals About Your Network Behavior

DNS Traffic Analysis provides a clear view of how your network behaves by transforming raw DNS traffic into structured insights. Patterns that were previously buried inside logs suddenly become visible, and behaviors that seemed normal now raise new questions. It begins with an overview of total queries, DNS query types and the query-to-response ratio, which helps validate normal DNS operation. Response code statistics shows if most traffic returns “No Error” or if high levels of NXDOMAIN and SERVFAIL levels point to misconfigurations or unreachable services.

Latency insights identify the domains with the slowest response times and display latency peaks across the capture period. Extremely slow domains or sudden spikes can indicate dependency issues or brief network incidents.

A device analysis lists all detected endpoints and the DNS servers observed during the capture, typically your internal DNS resolvers. It includes a full table of DNS communications, showing the source and destination IP addresses for each query as well as the associated query types and response codes, making it easy to spot endpoints generating abnormal behaviour. For example, a device with thousands of NXDOMAIN responses often indicates a misconfigured application or a process repeatedly querying non-existent domains.

Domains in traffic are also grouped into categories such as Business, Electronics or Online Communities. This view shows which types of services are accessed and which devices generated those requests. 

The assessment also provides a geographic perspective by showing where the DNS servers responding to your queries are located and where the resolved server IP addresses sit globally. These patterns feed into exposure and risk scoring based on widely used country-level risk indicators.

Together, these insights provide a complete understanding of how your environment uses DNS and create a strong foundation for examining the hidden security risks that may be present in the traffic itself.

Exposing Hidden Security Threats in DNS Traffic

Once the assessment has outlined how DNS is used across your environment, it shifts to its most important purpose of exposing hidden DNS security threats. What looked like ordinary DNS activity begins to reveal deeper signals that other tools often miss.The assessment highlights domains classified as malicious or suspicious by processing and curating multi-source DNS Threat Intelligence feeds using AI-driven and other analytical algorithms. Phishing sites are identified through NLP models and image-recognition techniques that analyse domain names and website visuals. Advanced analytics, including our patented tuple clustering, detect domain-generation algorithm (DGA) activity and other suspicious DNS query patterns that fall outside normal behavior.

The assessment also detects patterns that may indicate tunneling attempts. These include unusually long or repetitive subdomain structures and sequences of queries that do not match normal application behavior. Even at low volume, these early signals often reveal attempts to test whether data can move through DNS without being noticed.

Newly observed or rarely seen domains are surfaced as well. Flagging them as suspicious domains helps identify potential command-and-control callbacks, domain-generation behavior or unwanted third-party services.

This deeper analysis leverages DNS threat intelligence to expose threats already present in your DNS traffic ,and often reveals indicators long before they appear anywhere else.

Discovering Shadow IT, Applications, and Certificate Risks

Did you know that DNS traffic alone can show what people in your organisation actually use every day? Many teams are surprised by how much a DNS Risk Assessment uncovers without touching a single device.

By matching your traffic against thousands of known applications, the assessment quickly exposes unexpected tools: a second antivirus product running on only a few machines, remote-access tools like TeamViewer appearing where they should not, or old agents that were never fully removed. These findings often point to shadow IT and unnoticed software that quietly increases risk. The assessment also uncovers usage patterns, such as heavy streaming activity, that can impact network performance even if they are not direct security threats.

Certificate scanning adds another layer of visibility. Using passive DNS, the assessment identifies your domains and subdomains and checks their SSL and TLS configurations, often revealing expired certificates or outdated setups that can break services or weaken security.

All of this comes from DNS alone, offering a clear, human view of what is really happening in your environment.

Assessing Brand Risk

Google recently filed a lawsuit against a global phishing group that used fake domains to impersonate its services. Google claims the group harmed its reputation by illegally displaying its trademark on fraudulent websites and convincing users they were legitimate. This case shows how quickly a brand can be copied online and how damaging impersonation can become.

The DNS Risk Assessment helps organizations uncover similar risks before they escalate. It highlights domains that closely resemble your organization’s identity and could be used to mislead customers or employees. These insights give you early visibility into potential misuse of your brand name, helping you protect trust and prevent attackers from exploiting your online presence.

The DNS Risk Assessment Is Only the First Step

The DNS Risk Assessment concludes with an exposure score that brings all findings together into a single, clear indicator of your overall risk level. It reflects everything uncovered throughout the assessment, including hidden threats, configuration issues, suspicious domains, shadow IT, certificate weaknesses and early signs of brand impersonation. This score helps you understand your security posture at a glance and shows which areas should be prioritised first.

When teams reach this point in the report, there is usually a mix of relief and urgency. Relief because the unknown is now visible. Urgency because visibility is not the same as protection. It is often the same reaction we saw in the customer case that opened this blog: once their tunneling attempt, certificate issues and malicious domains appeared in the report, the question quickly shifted from “what is happening?” to “what do we fix first?”

The assessment provides clarity and direction, but it is only a snapshot in time. Threats evolve, behavior changes, and attackers adapt quickly. Long-term resilience comes from turning these insights into continuous DNS Security action.With EfficientIP’s 360° DNS Security solution, organizations can protect proactively, detect early, and respond quickly before small signals turn into real incidents.

The First Step Toward Stronger DNS Security

As we have seen throughout this blog, the EfficientIP DNS Risk Assessment reveals what is really happening in your DNS traffic and exposes risks that usually stay hidden. It is simple, fast, and completely non-intrusive, yet it delivers immediate clarity on where your organization is most vulnerable. With that level of visibility, the next step becomes obvious: act on the insights while they are still early and manageable.Getting started is easy and free. Just complete the form, launch your assessment and take the first step toward stronger, smarter DNS security.