In this edition, we again focus on concentration of malicious activity by the same six categories we studied in the last edition in the Fall of 2021. We expect that some criteria will remain relevant over the foreseeable future; that is, as datapoints related to domain names, there are unlikely to become less forensically-valuable unless that internets fundamental structure changes. Other datapoints may wax and wane in relevance.

In 2021, Cybersecurity Insiders conducted the fourth annual threat hunting research project to gain deeper insights into the maturity and evolution of the security practice. While many SOCs are struggling to cope with the current security threat workload, more organizations are adopting threat hunting as part of their security operations. They are discovering that proactive threat hunting can reduce the risk and impact of threats while improving defenses against new attacks.

A review of domain registration, hosting, and content-related data on attack patterns and trends.

A survey of 200 global security professionals as to their opinions, responses, and outlook of the Solarwinds software chain compromise.

In the DomainTools Reports, we explore various “hotspots” of malicious or abusive activity across the Internet. To date, we have analyzed such varied markers as top level domain (TLD), Whois privacy provider, domain age, patterns of registrant behavior, and more. In each case, we found patterns across our database of over 300 million (315M+ as of this writing) active domains worldwide; these patterns helped us pinpoint nefarious activity, at a large scale, in ways that are similar to methodologies used by security analysts and threat hunters at smaller scales to expose threat actor infrastructure.

This paper outlines the results of the DomainTools second annual Cybersecurity Report Card Survey. More than 500 security professionals from companies ranging in size, industry and geography were surveyed about their security posture and asked to grade the overall health of their programs.

After analyzing the activities of cyber threat actors this year, the DomainTools Research Team has identified four key cybersecurity concerns that security teams, executives, consumers and government officials can expect to encounter next year. From hacked drones with the potential to cause physical harm, to advancing activity from North Korea and Hidden Cobra, this paper connects the dots between the past, present and future to help organizations get ready for the security challenges of 2018.

To lure unsuspecting consumers to fake websites to purchase counterfeit goods, cybercriminals abuse the Domain Name System (DNS) – every day, every hour, every minute. In this report, “Luxury Brands, Cheap Domains: Why Retailers Are Losing The Fight Against Online Counterfeiting,” cybersecurity firms Farsight Security and DomainTools, the leaders in DNS intelligence, took a close look at four international luxury brand domains and learned that the potential abuse of their brand, by counterfeiting and other malicious activities, is significant.