DNS Security In San Francisco
IPSOFACTO, IT Services has been a leading IT firm in San Francisco for over 20 years. Our focus is on IT Operations, ensuring organizations throughout the Bay Area have tech, applications, systems and network needed to experience success and fast growth. This makes DNS security in San Francisco a prime topic of conversation when we meet with both current and prospective clients. IPSOFACTO has strategically partnered with innovative brands such as Cisco, Meraki, Apple, Microsoft and many more to help our clients have the best in IT Ops.
Before we can begin to build out DNS security protocols and processes we first need to understand what DNS is and understand how risks are presented.
What is DNS?
DNS is the Domain Name System. It is a crucial part to the Internet. The average internet user doesn’t even realize that they are ever using the DNS. The Domain Name System maps qualified domains to the IP addresses on their servers. This in it’s most basic form is an “road map” of the internet or address book. When a computer needs to communicate with a website it uses DNS to identify and find the computer of the website to display on the users screen. It’s responsible for translating website names and email address of every organization or entity into a IP addresses, combinations of numbers needed for the computers to talk to each other. Without DNS, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.
If DNS is necessary to browse the website or communicate with other computers online, do I already have a DNS Service?
Yes, this is exactly what is allowing you to view this blog post or communicate with your friends on social media. For most people and a lot of small businesses, the DNS is provided and configured from their Internet Service Provider (ISP).
By Lion Kimbro – Own work, Public Domain, Link
Let’s look at what we know now about DNS…
When you type in a web address, for example, now.IPOSOFACTO.net, your Internet Service Provider looks at the DNS associated with the domain name, translates it into an IP address (for example 316.228.122.30) and directs your internet connection to the correct website, our website.
Now, what happens if someone gains access to your businesses DNS?
The domain name system is a fundamental component of all networking. Although, from a security standpoint DNS poses a lot of risks. With it, you can either compromise or protect and control the entire network.
A perfect example of this would be when a computer gets infected with a malicious virus or software, the hacker can gain access to the users DNS server. By gaining access to the DNS server, criminals can control which website a user is connected to and interfere with their online browsing.
If a businesses DNS is attacked and goes down, all of the companies network connected devices stop working. Mobile employees who access the companies internal applications are out of luck and internal connectivity is lost. There aren’t many organizations these days that can conduct business without being online. Hostage Internet connectivity leads to loss of revenue, customer churn and a negative impact on the brand.
We’ve all seen the malicious impact that controlling the DNS can have businesses back in October of 2016 when a wide spread attack took down major websites such as, Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and others. Imagine the effect this could have on a small business or fast growth startup in San Francisco, where every hour of business operations relies on being connected to the internet and keeping internal data secure.
Taking steps to protect organizations DNS
When it comes to securing DNS for companies of any size, we were thrilled to see the partnership of OpenDNS joining Cisco. As a Cisco and OpenDNS partner, we’ve been at the forefront of rolling out layered DNS Network Security in San Francisco using OpenDNS and the Cisco Umbrella. Most security agents recognize threats on the perimeter or endpoint of the network, that’s not the case with OpenDNS. OpenDNS prevents threats and attacks earlier, providing security visibility and enforcement whether users are on or off the network. Partnering with IPSOFACTO while using the Cisco Umbrella is one of the easiest and fastest layers of security to deploy company wide – everywhere.
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