Domain and Certificate Services
Domain and Certificate Services are foundational components of internet security, providing the mechanisms for reliable identity verification and confidential communication. In a cybersecurity context, these services are high-value targets because compromising them allows attackers to reroute traffic, steal data, and impersonate legitimate organizations.
Domain Registration & Hosting
This category involves the initial process of securing a domain name and the hosting of the website files and services associated with that domain.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Account Security and Ownership Integrity. The focus is on protecting the registration account from compromise, as this is the highest level of control over the domain.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Domain Registrar Account Hijacking: An attacker gains control of the account at the domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap) through phishing or credential theft. Once compromised, the attacker can change DNS records to redirect all website and email traffic, leading to massive Domain Hijacking.
Weak Authentication: Failure to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the registrar account leaves the entire domain exposed to simple password guessing or credential stuffing attacks.
Expiry/Lapse: Allowing the domain registration to expire, which allows a malicious actor to register the domain immediately after the grace period, leading to the complete loss of the digital identity.
Hosting Vulnerabilities: If a website is hosted on a shared server, a vulnerability in one customer's site can be used to pivot and attack the files or databases of an adjacent site.
DNS Management
This involves configuring and controlling the records (A, CNAME, MX, TXT, etc.) that map the domain name to specific internet resources.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Record Integrity and Service Availability. The focus is on ensuring DNS responses are authentic and timely, directing users to the intended server.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
DNS Zone Transfer Attacks: Misconfigured DNS servers that allow unauthorized users to request and receive a full copy of the DNS zone file, revealing the organization’s entire network map, including internal and non-public hostnames.
Dangling DNS Records (Subdomain Takeover): This occurs when a Canonical Name (CNAME) record points to a service (often in the cloud) that is no longer active but the record itself was not deleted. An attacker can claim the abandoned service name and take over the subdomain, using it to serve phishing pages or malware under the organization's trusted name.
Weak Email Authentication: Failure to properly configure security-focused DNS records like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). This allows attackers to easily spoof the organization's email address for phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC).
Certificate Authorities (CA) & SSL/TLS
This category involves the organizations (CAs) that issue digital certificates, and the cryptographic protocols (SSL/TLS) that use these certificates to establish encrypted communication.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Trust, Encryption, and Identity Validation. The focus is on ensuring the certificate is valid, the communication is strongly encrypted, and the identity verified by the CA is legitimate.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Certificate Misissuance/Impersonation: A trusted CA mistakenly or maliciously issues a valid certificate to an attacker for a legitimate domain. This allows the attacker to launch a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack that browsers trust, compromising the Confidentiality of user communications.
Cipher Strength and Protocol Obsolescence: Continuing to use older, vulnerable protocols like SSL 3.0 or TLS 1.0/1.1, or weak cipher suites. These are easily exploited by modern decryption tools, defeating the purpose of the certificate and exposing traffic.
Lack of Monitoring for Transparency: Failure to monitor public Certificate Transparency (CT) logs. CAs are required to log all issued certificates publicly; monitoring these logs is the only way an organization can spot if a rogue certificate has been issued for its domain.
Certificate Expiration: Allowing a certificate to expire, which triggers immediate, full-screen browser warnings for all users, halts all encrypted traffic, and causes a complete outage of the service's Availability and trust.
ThreatNG is a compelling solution for securing Domain & Certificate Services because its all-in-one external attack surface management (EASM) and digital risk protection (DRP) capabilities are specifically designed to expose the critical, publicly visible misconfigurations in DNS, registration, and certificates that attackers prioritize. It provides the essential attacker's perspective on these foundational services.
ThreatNG’s External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to comprehensively map all assets tied to an organization's domain identity, without needing any internal access.
Domain Intelligence and Subdomain Discovery: ThreatNG meticulously discovers and maps the organization’s entire domain and subdomain portfolio, directly addressing the risks in Domain Registration & Hosting and DNS Management. This process uncovers not only sanctioned assets but also forgotten test subdomains or those vulnerable to Dangling DNS Records.
Continuous Monitoring: Domain records and certificates are dynamic assets. ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of DNS records, certificate status, and domain registration status. This is critical for preventing two significant risks: it alerts the organization if a certificate is nearing Expiration (a risk in Certificate Authorities (CA) & SSL) and flags any sudden, malicious changes to a DNS record, which could indicate a successful Domain Registrar Account Hijacking.
External Assessment Capabilities
ThreatNG’s External Assessment assigns actionable risk scores that pinpoint the most likely attack vectors against Domain and Certificate Services.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This score is highly dependent on the integrity of the domain's DNS and hosting configurations.
Example: A high score is triggered when the assessment confirms a vulnerability to Subdomain Takeover due to a CNAME record pointing to a decommissioned cloud service (a Dangling DNS Record). ThreatNG confirms that this record is externally exploitable, providing undeniable proof of a critical flaw in DNS Management.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This score directly measures the organization’s resilience against identity-based attacks that rely on email spoofing, a core risk in DNS Management.
Example: The assessment analyzes the strength and proper configuration of DNS records critical for email authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If DMARC is absent or weak, ThreatNG assigns a high susceptibility score, confirming that attackers can easily spoof the domain's email address for BEC attacks.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score factors in the security hygiene of the exposed servers, including their use of encryption.
Example: The score is increased if ThreatNG detects that the organization’s web server is configured to use obsolete, vulnerable protocols (like TLS 1.0) or weak cipher suites, directly addressing the risk of Cipher Strength and Protocol Obsolescence in Certificate Authorities (CA) & SSL.
Investigation Modules and Technology Identification
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules provide the forensic-level detail required to locate and fix security flaws in these foundational services.
Domain and Subdomain Intelligence: This module is essential for mitigating risks in all three categories.
Certificate Status Check: ThreatNG specifically performs SSL/TLS Certificate Status checks across all identified assets, flagging both Expired Certificates and those nearing expiration. This allows proactive renewal to prevent a complete Availability outage.
Domain Registrar Verification: It checks for common registrar security flaws, and by using continuous DNS monitoring, it provides evidence of external record changes that indicate potential Domain Registrar Account Hijacking.
Search Engine Exploitation: This feature checks for the inadvertent exposure of sensitive data via search engines, which could compromise registration.
Example: The module might find that a search engine has indexed a development server's public file directory containing plaintext documentation about DNS Zone Transfer procedures or temporary Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs).
Archived Web Pages: This feature helps secure legacy assets often forgotten during domain consolidation.
Example: ThreatNG discovers an archived login page for an old Domain Hosting or DNS Management portal that is still live but running outdated, vulnerable software, providing an attacker with a low-hanging fruit entry point.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The Intelligence Repositories inject crucial real-world threat context, especially concerning account and credential compromises.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This directly addresses the single most significant threat to Domain Registration & Hosting. It alerts the organization if Domain Registrar Credentials or administrator account details for the DNS portal are discovered on the Dark Web, which is the necessary precursor to a Domain Registrar Account Hijacking attack.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, eXploit): This ensures the organization patches web servers associated with domain services.
Example: If the organization's web server is using outdated open-source SSL libraries, and that vulnerability is listed on the KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) list in DarCache, the patching of that server is prioritized to prevent a compromise that could expose the TLS private key.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external validation and intelligence create powerful synergies when combined with internal security services.
Certificate Transparency (CT) Monitoring Solutions: ThreatNG provides comprehensive Domain and Subdomain Intelligence, which serves as the ultimate asset inventory. This inventory can be fed into CT monitoring tools, ensuring they monitor all related subdomains in public logs for signs of Certificate Misissuance or rogue certificate issuance by a compromised CA.
External DNS Resolver Services (DNS Security): ThreatNG’s findings regarding misconfigured DNS records, weak DMARC policies, or Dangling DNS Records provide actionable remediation data. This intelligence can be used to validate and strengthen the configurations within external DNS resolver services, improving resilience against DNS Hijacking and DNS-based DoS attacks.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): When ThreatNG’s continuous monitoring detects an imminent event, such as an Expired Certificate or a compromised administrator credential from DarCache Rupture, the high-fidelity alert is used to trigger an automated workflow in a SOAR system. This workflow can automatically open a critical ticket, send a preemptive communication to the security team, and force a password rotation on the compromised registrar account, preventing both an outage and a Domain Registrar Account Hijacking event.
