AKAMAI Technologies Inc. has alerted businesses on the Recursive Domain Name Servers (DNS) as a major security gap. Despite the myriad security solutions currently in use to thwart attacks, malicious actors continue to exploit weaknesses and gaps, resulting in a variety of negative consequences for today’s enterprises, Akamai said.
Recursive DNS, a critical but often overlooked part of enterprise infrastructure, can be one of these gaps, the company added. Even though a majority of software and clients rely on DNS to communicate with one another, DNS does not have built-in intelligence to determine if a domain being requested by a user is safe or malicious.
“Enterprises can’t afford to spend significant time deploying and operationally scaling new security layers given the rate of change of the advanced threat landscape,” Christina Richmond, International Data Corp. (IDC) Security Services program director, was quoted by Akamai as saying. “They need a simple and fast way to add effective security controls. Using a global cloud-based DNS infrastructure simplifies security by giving the enterprise effective protection, against malware and DNS threats, that can be self-integrated and operates at a global scale.”
Citing the Ponemon Institute, Akamai said the average cost of a cyber attack on a company is $9.5 million.
The company added even though a majority of software and clients rely on DNS to communicate with one another, DNS does not have built-in intelligence to determine if a domain being requested by a user is safe or malicious.
The IDC has identified security as among the fast-growing portions of the information and communications technology market that IDC calls “Innovation Accelerators”.