DNS Security Rating

Managing the "DNS Security" Rating: Securing the Internet's Nervous System with ThreatNG

In the intricate ecosystem of third-party risk management (TPRM), DNS Security is often the first indicator that auditors and rating agencies scrutinize. It serves as the backbone of your digital trust. If your DNS is insecure, your traffic can be hijacked, your emails spoofed, and your brand impersonated.

At ThreatNG, we understand that a poor DNS Security score signals more than just technical misconfiguration—it signals a lack of governance. It suggests to insurers and partners that you are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, cache poisoning, and domain hijacking. However, external scanners often lack the context to distinguish between a critical vulnerability and a strategic architectural choice. This guide explains how to use the ThreatNG ecosystem to take control of your DNS narrative.

Understanding the DNS Security Rating

To improve your score, you must understand what is being graded. DNS Security measures the integrity, authenticity, and resilience of your domain infrastructure. Rating agencies perform "outside-in" assessments to verify if you are preventing bad actors from weaponizing your domain against your customers or employees.

The DNS Security score is primarily derived from:

  1. Integrity & Authentication: The deployment of DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to prevent cache poisoning, ensuring that users are routed to your actual server and not a spoofer's replica.

  2. Infrastructure Hygiene: Checking for Open Zone Transfers (AXFR) that leak your entire network topology, or Open Recursive Resolvers that can be weaponized for DDoS amplification attacks.

  3. Asset Resilience: The prevention of Subdomain Takeovers (Dangling CNAMEs) where attackers claim abandoned cloud resources to host phishing sites on your legitimate domain.

The Challenge: Automated scanners are binary. They see a missing DNSSEC record on a temporary marketing domain and flag it as a "High Risk" failure, unaware that the domain does not handle any sensitive data. They penalize you for "Shadow IT" subdomains you didn't know existed. Without context, a secure but complex DNS architecture looks negligent.

The ThreatNG Strategy: Opportunity, Refutation, and Defense

Managing your DNS Security rating isn't just about toggling settings at your registrar; it's about governing your digital identity. ThreatNG empowers you to move from a reactive "cleanup" mode to a proactive governance strategy using our External Discovery, External Assessment, and Policy Management engines.

1. Proactive Opportunity Finding (Beating the Algorithm)

The most effective way to manage a DNS Security rating is to identify vulnerabilities before an external auditor flags them. Rating agencies scan periodically; ThreatNG scans continuously. By combining Investigation Modules, Intelligence Repositories, Dynamic Entity Management, and our predictive ThreatNG Security Ratings, you can identify threats before they impact a rating.

  • The Strategy: You begin by populating Dynamic Entity Management with not just domains, but specific People (e.g., Cloud Architects), Places (e.g., new regional hubs), and Brands (e.g., "Project Apollo"). As soon as these entities are defined, ThreatNG continuously hunts for exposures related to them.

  • The Example: Imagine your "Project Apollo" team launches a marketing microsite (apollo.yourbrand.com) that points to an AWS S3 bucket. A week later, they delete the bucket but leave the DNS record active, creating a "Dangling CNAME."

  • A World of Possibilities: Crucially, this is just one example of the many possibilities with ThreatNG. You could also use Sensitive Code Exposure to find developers hardcoding DNS provider API keys in public repositories (preventing infrastructure hijacking that would tank your Non-Human Identity Exposure rating), use Dark Web Presence to find compromised registrar credentials before they are used to change your nameservers, or use Search Engine Exploitation to see if a staging subdomain has been indexed by Google, exposing it to attackers before you intended to go live.

2. Challenging Inaccuracies (The Refutation Strategy)

A significant portion of DNS Security penalties stems from Contextual Misinterpretation. You may be penalized for "Missing DNSSEC" on a domain that is intentionally inactive, or for a "Risky Configuration" that belongs to a third-party vendor. To dispute this, you need forensic evidence gathered by Investigation Modules and backed by Policy Management.

  • The Strategy: When a rating agency penalizes you for a theoretical risk that doesn't exist in practice, you need to prove it. ThreatNG lets you use Dynamic Entity Management to automatically classify assets based on their usage profile.

  • The Example: A rating agency penalizes your score for "Missing DNSSEC" and "Open Port 53" on a specific asset associated with one of your domains.

    • The Evidence: You use Domain Intelligence to prove that the domain is pointing to a shared hosting provider where you do not control the nameserver configuration. You further use Archive Web Pages to show that the site has never hosted corporate content.

    • The Classification: You then use Dynamic Entity Management to auto-classify this asset as "Vendor Managed."

    • The Report: You generate a report using Granular Risk Scoring that shows that, while the agency rates this as a "High" risk to your infrastructure, your internal policy rates it as "Third-Party Risk." You support this by showing that your Cyber Risk Exposure rating remains stable and an 'A' grade because the asset is segmented from your core network, providing the irrefutable data needed to refute the finding.

  • A World of Possibilities: It is important to emphasize that this is only one of many possibilities. You might also use ThreatNG to prove that an "Open Zone Transfer" finding is actually a Honeypot (verified via Technology Stack analysis) designed to catch reconnaissance, disprove a "Malicious Domain" claim by showing the asset was divested years ago (verified via SEC 8-K Filings intelligence), or refute a "Spam" listing by showing the traffic originated from a spoofed IP not within your ASN range (protecting your BEC & Phishing Susceptibility rating).

3. Demonstrating Context & Control (The Bolstering Strategy)

Often, a DNS Security finding is technically accurate (e.g., "Wildcard DNS Record Detected"), but the configuration is a business requirement backed by compensating controls. A scanner sees a vulnerability; you see a design choice. Here, your goal shifts from refuting the data to bolstering the context using technical validation and Exception Management.

  • The Strategy: You use ThreatNG to prove that compensating controls exist, and then use Policy Management to prove that the risk is governed, not ignored.

  • The Example: A rating agency flags a "Wildcard DNS Record" (*.app.yourdomain.com) as a risk because it can facilitate subdomain hijacking if not managed carefully.

    • The Evidence: You use Cloud and SaaS Exposure to validate that the wildcard points strictly to a controlled Kubernetes ingress controller with strict authentication, ensuring no dangling resources exist.

    • The Validation: You reference your ThreatNG Web Application Hijack Susceptibility rating, which remains high ('A') due to strict WAF rules and authentication layers at that ingress point.

    • The Governance: To satisfy auditors, you use Exception Management to formally document this asset as a "Managed Exception" with a defined owner and review date. This creates an audit trail that proves to stakeholders that the configuration is not a lazy oversight but a governed "Authorized Operation" necessary for your SaaS architecture.

  • A World of Possibilities: Explicitly, this is just one example of the many possibilities available with ThreatNG. You could also use DarChain Attack Path Intelligence to prove that an "Internal IP Disclosure" in DNS (Split-Horizon DNS) does not lead to an exploitable path because the IP is on an air-gapped network, use Social Media intelligence to show you are proactively communicating a planned DNS migration to a more secure provider ( bolstering your Brand Damage Susceptibility stance), or use Bank Identification Numbers data to prove that a specific DNS segment is dedicated to PCI-DSS compliant transactions and is isolated from the rest of the network.

The ThreatNG Ecosystem Advantage

ThreatNG provides the contextual intelligence required to turn a static checklist into a dynamic security strategy. Here is how our specific pillars support a superior DNS Security rating: