DNS IC & DDI OC Enhancements: Improve Network Anomaly Detection

EfficientIP DNS IC & DDI OC enhancements deepen network anomaly detection and investigation to elevate network observability and security. New “domain behavior analysis” in DNS Intelligence Center enables detection of suspicious domains and investigation of domain behavior. 

EfficientIP’s latest DNS IC & DDI OC enhancements deliver powerful new features that deepen network anomaly detection and investigation in enterprise DNS traffic to further elevate network observability and security. The newly introduced domain behavior analysis as part of DNS Intelligence Center (DNS IC) enables the detection of suspicious domains and investigation of domain behavior in the Domain Name System (DNS) traffic of any organization. These enhancements complement existing DNS analytics and domain name intelligence to further help SOCs and security teams quickly detect and effectively investigate cyber threats across networks.

A Recap on DNS Intelligence Center (DNS IC)

EfficientIP’s DNS IC is a cloud-based visualization portal that empowers organizations to detect and investigate DNS-related threats with greater precision and speed through comprehensive DNS analytics and insights. By harnessing DNS traffic’s rich data streams and presenting them in an actionable way, DNS IC enables security teams and SOCs to proactively safeguard their networks.

With its advanced AI-driven DNS threat intelligence, the platform provides deep domain insights, including risk scoring on reputation and IoCs, for an immediate understanding of a potential threat’s level of maliciousness. Matching organization’s DNS traffic against EfficientIP’s DNS threat intelligence database also allows organizations to detect cyber threats early, enhancing their security posture.

The Limitation of Reputation-based Threat Detection

While domain reputation-based threat detection is critical in helping organizations quickly identify and respond to threats, it can be limited in detecting some of the more sophisticated and complex DNS attacks. 

Without comprehensive analytics into DNS traffic patterns, organizations may miss indicators of data exfiltration, DNS tunneling, command-and-control (C2) communications, and other malicious activities. Threats originating from newly observed domains (NODs) are particularly dangerous.

Additionally, investigation can be inefficient without fast access to critical data, leaving security teams severely disadvantaged when the clock is ticking against an active threat, increasing the risk of overlooking malicious intent.

These challenges highlight the need to get broad insights into the organization’s DNS traffic history, enabling proactive detection and investigation of suspicious behavior. 

Enter Domain Behavior Analysis

EfficientIP’s new Domain Behavior Analysis feature addresses these gaps by delivering powerful insights and analytics into domain and subdomain behavior through the analysis of DNS queries in your organization’s traffic. Historical DNS data is processed with advanced heuristic and mathematical algorithms to identify suspicious domain activity, uncovering potential threats such as data exfiltration, DNS tunneling, and C2 communication. An interactive dashboard, updated in near real-time, provides instant access to a list of detected suspicious domains, ensuring continuous visibility into evolving risks.

Security teams can then access detailed domain behavior analytics   such as global domain behavior statistics and suspicious domain insights, including query rates, number and usage of subdomains, service failure rates, and more. The retro-analysis capability provides historical insights into DNS activity, allowing security teams to spot and analyze patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Once the investigation is finalized, they can take appropriate actions such as blocking the domain to stop the attack, ensuring proactive threat mitigation, or acknowledge or allow it permanently based on their assessment. 

Delivering Faster, Deeper DNS Threat Detection and Investigation

By combining behavioral and historical analysis, organizations can identify potentially malicious domains and subdomains early, even if reputation lists or feeds have not flagged them.

The Domain Behavior Detection feature strengthens DNS IC’s overall benefits, particularly in enhancing visibility, deepening threat detection, and enabling effective threat investigation. 

By leveraging historical, granular, fact-based DNS insights to detect abnormal query patterns and anomalies, security teams can better identify advanced threats like DNS tunneling, C2C activity, and unauthorized data exfiltration.

This accelerates data-driven decisions and expedites response times, reducing team workload and increasing operational efficiency. The entire threat-handling process is further streamlined, freeing up resources for valuable proactive security activity.

Domain Behavior Analysis in Action

The DNS Suspicious Domain Behavior Detection feature has multiple powerful applications in both responding to cyber threats and proactively reducing risk levels. For example, teams can track the volume and frequency of queries to suspicious domains, enabling them to spot patterns that indicate potential threats. They can also investigate specific domain activities within DNS caches to identify emerging risks and trends. By correlating these findings with DNS IC domain intelligence based on reputation, organizations gain a deeper understanding of domain-based threats and potential malicious activity.

New DDI Observability Center (DDI OC) Enhancements

Alongside DNS IC, EfficientIP’s DDI OC helps organizations gain comprehensive DDI visibility across their diverse networks with DNS analytics and DDI telemetry to optimize the efficiency of network operations and network performance. 

With the new DNS IC & DDI OC enhancements now available as part of the product, network and security teams can bridge the gap with broader DNS observability, looking at the DNS traffic and client requests with a drill-down to source IP addresses. Leveraging these new DNS insights, NOC and SOC teams can further monitor the DNS service, pinpoint network anomalies like unexpected high query volume, high recursion time, high error rate, or high number of malicious domain hits, and effectively drill down to the individual client and its IP address that initiated these anomalies for effective investigation. 

By correlating both DNS IC and DDI OC analytics further enriched with the latest DNS IC & DDI OC enhancements, network and security teams gain agility and efficiency in working together for faster, deeper, and more accurate network anomaly detection, investigation, and response. 

Key Takeaways for DNS IC & DDI OC Enhancements

EfficientIP’s latest DNS IC and DDI OC enhancements showcase the company’s commitment to advancing DNS security and network observability. The new Domain Behavior Analysis feature and expanded DNS analytics in DDI OC enable organizations to better detect network anomalies, accelerate investigations, and optimize operational efficiency across their network infrastructure improving network performance and resilience.