Domain-name lookups only reveal websites visited, not individual pages viewed, right? Wrong: the interaction between a user and the DNS is more revealing than previously believed, according to a paper from German postdoc researcher Dominik Herrmann.
In work published at pre-print server Arxiv, Herrmann writes that behavioural tracking using recursive name servers is a genuine privacy risk. Someone with access to the infrastructure can easily watch a user's behaviour while they have one IP address, create a classifier for that user, and look for behaviour that matches that classifier when the IP address changes.
Read moreCybercriminals have started a new trend for conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks and rely on a type of DNS amplification that leverages text records for making the operation more effective; in some campaigns, parts of a press release from the White House have been observed by researchers.
The tactic is not new, but more and more incidents of this sort have been recorded. The entertainment sector is the most targeted. Attackers have used large TXT records in reflection attacks in the past. Cybercriminals often use intermediate victims to reflect the bad traffic to their target.
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