Cisco Blog > Threat Research

The recent discovery of Wekby and Point of Sale malware using DNS requests as a command and control channel highlights the need to consider DNS as a potentially malicious channel. Although a skilled analyst may be able to quickly spot unusual activity because they are familiar with their organisation’s normal DNS activity, manually reviewing DNS logs is typically time consuming and tedious. In an environment where it might be unclear what malicious DNS traffic looks like, how can we identify malicious DNS requests?

We all have subconscious mental models that shape our perceptions of the environment and help us to identify the unusual. An outlandish or unusual happening in the local neighbourhood piques our curiosity and make us want to find out what is going on. We compare our expectations of normality with our observations, if the two don’t match we want to know why. A similar approach can be applied to DNS logs. If we can construct a baseline or model of ‘normality’ we can compare our observations to the model and spot if reality as we see it, is wildly different from that which we would expect.

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