Area-name system (DNS)- primarily based cyber assaults have gotten more and more complicated, and AI will solely make managing them much more difficult.
In keeping with a latest report, Chief Info Safety Officers (CISOs) anticipate a tumultuous season of cyber threats, with low confidence of their talents to defend towards them successfully. The CISO Outlook 2025 report discovered that 70% of CISOs consider safety threats will improve within the coming yr, and a staggering 98% count on them to rise over the subsequent three years.
Area-based assaults, which exploit or mimic respectable web domains, are a major supply of this concern. These embrace hijacking area registrations, deploying lookalike domains for phishing, typosquatting, or taking up misconfigured subdomains.
In keeping with the report, in 2024, cybersquatting and area/DNS hijacking have been ranked as the highest two safety threats by CISOs, and so they’re anticipated to stay within the prime three for the subsequent three years.
Securing public-facing area infrastructure and exterior risksSecuring DNS: A unending battle
The battle to deal with DNS-based assaults will not be new. A 2023 international survey revealed that 90% of organizations had suffered no less than one DNS assault up to now yr, with the common firm being hit 7.5 instances. These aren’t minor incidents; the common value of a single DNS assault now exceeds $1 million in damages. The results are extreme, with over 80% of companies experiencing utility downtime after a DNS assault and 29% struggling the theft of delicate information.
This long-standing issue is mirrored within the confidence ranges of safety leaders. The CISO Outlook 2025 report revealed that solely 7% of CISOs felt “very confident” of their group’s capability to mitigate domain-based assaults. An extra 76% acknowledged they have been solely “somewhat confident”.
In keeping with Ihab Shraim, Chief Know-how Officer at CSC, it is because DNS and domain-related infrastructure are inherently tender targets.
“[Bad actors] focus on the assets organizations must keep publicly accessible, such as DNS, websites, or email gateways, making it easier to launch precise attacks like cybersquatting or DNS cache poisoning.”
– Ihab Shraim, Chief Know-how Officer at CSC
The issue is not essentially an absence of instruments. Practically three-fifths (59%) of safety leaders reported that when their agency detects a domain-linked risk, they’ve instruments and processes in place to mitigate it. Nevertheless, they admit it stays a “complex and time-consuming process to take threats down,” indicating that the out there options aren’t protecting tempo with the complexity of the assaults.
The amplifying function of synthetic intelligence
AI is accelerating each the dimensions and velocity of domain-based impersonation threats. Cybercriminals can now leverage AI to scan for deserted or misconfigured subdomains susceptible to takeovers and generate huge numbers of recent domains for phishing campaigns at a exceptional scale.
Fashionable cyber assaults are additionally turning into extra subtle by combining a number of methods. An assault might start with social engineering paired with a lookalike area to determine credibility, which then permits a extra vital risk like a ransomware deployment.Â
As CSC CISO Mark Eggleston notes, “attacks such as ransomware don’t happen in isolation… bad actors can then go on to steal information in hybrid or blended attacks, which could turn out to be truly devastating.”
Strengthen the human factor
To counter this new age of DNS threats, organizations should handle the human weaknesses that facilitate many of those assaults. As Shraim notes, reconnaissance campaigns embrace looking for workers probably to fall sufferer to a phishing assault.
“Bad actors conduct extensive reconnaissance — scanning everything from social media to job boards — to identify potential vulnerabilities, including disgruntled insiders who may be susceptible to phishing.”
– Ihab Shraim, Chief Know-how Officer at CSC
This human-centric vulnerability is compounded by the rise of “Shadow AI” — the unauthorized use of AI instruments like ChatGPT. Whereas these instruments can enhance productiveness, in addition they create vital dangers, as workers might unintentionally share delicate firm or buyer info with third-party giant language fashions that haven’t been vetted. The specter of Shadow AI provides a further layer of complication to the already overwhelming process of managing Shadow IT, particularly when additionally contemplating the danger of insecure LLM utilization in your provide chain.
97% of safety leaders admit they’re involved about giving AI-based third-party techniques entry to firm information.
Watch this video to study why human threat administration should transfer past Shadow AI.
Are you ready for the subsequent three years of subtle assaults?
As DNS cyber threats develop in quantity and class, fueled by AI and targeted on domain-based vectors, CISOs discover themselves in a difficult place. Confidence is low, current instruments are struggling to maintain up, and the human factor stays a important level of failure.
Making ready for the subsequent era of assaults means shifting DNS from an afterthought to a first-class safety management.. Cybersecurity’s built-in method, which embeds DNSSEC hygiene checks, sub-domain takeover detection, and human-risk scoring right into a single workflow, exemplifies how course of automation and AI can scale safety throughout each infrastructure and folks.
For CISOs, investing in these controls will make the distinction between surviving the subsequent three years of extremely subtle cybersquatting and domain-based assaults, and turning into the subsequent cautionary headline.
Prepared to save lots of time and streamline your belief administration course of?
