How to use Farsight Security's DNSDB to harness the power of passive DNS

DNS describes the structure of resources on the internet. It can provide lots of valuable information about (attacker or target) infrastructure. However, in order to query DNS records, you must already know the exact domains or subdomains to query. When examining unknown infrastructure, this is not practical. On top of that, DNS records can change often, so historical information is lost. Passive DNS databases help solve both of these problems. Farsight Security DNSDB is the largest passive DNS database in the world. With DNSDB, you can answer questions like “How has this network infrastructure changed over time?”, “What other domains and subdomain point (or have pointed to) this IP address?”, “What are the subdomains and resource records for this domain?”

How passive DNS works

Companies like Farsight Security use ICANN zone files, and partner with ISPs and other large networks to deploy sensors that monitor and record DNS queries and responses as they happen. The IP address and identities of those who are making the queries are not recorded. The resulting database can then be used by customers to query on both recent and historic DNS data. It is important to note that no passive DNS database will have a truly complete set of all DNS for all domains. The coverage of a passive DNS service is only as good as the coverage of its sensors. With the largest and oldest network of DNS sensors, Farsight Security DNSDB is the most complete commercial passive DNS database available.

Getting started

In order to use Farsight Security DNSDB, you must have an API key that authenticates you to the service. Farsight Security offers a free community edition and free trial access to DNSDB. Of course, you can also purchase a full subscription.

Once you have obtained an API key, it can be used with your integration/platform of choice. This guide will cover using the Python library and CLI dnsdb-python.

Ensure Python 3 is installed on your system, then run this command to install dnsdb-python.

pip3 install dnsdb-python

Next, set the environment variable DNSDB_KEY to your DNSDB API key.

Basic DNSDB queries

DNSDB has two query types: forward and inverse. Forward queries find all known records associated with a domain or subdomain. Inverse lookups find all hostnames that have pointed to a specific IP address or CNAME value.

in this guide, we will be running queries to examine the infrastructure behind a credential harvesting page.

This particular credential harvesting page sends stolen credentials to a web server at plotoperation1.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.

Forward queries

A forward query with a wildcard will output the full history of all records in DNSDB for the domain and its subdomains. Results can also be filtered by date and record type, and output to various file formats, such as CSV and JSON, if desired.

dnsdb forward "*.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com"


;; bailiwick:  com.
 ;; count:      2
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns1.reg.ru.
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns2.reg.ru.

 ;; bailiwick:  3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.
 ;; count:      40
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-07T20:56:39+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-20T22:22:35+00:00
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN A 194.58.112.174

 ;; bailiwick:  com.
 ;; count:      81
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-06T19:35:53+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-20T22:22:35+00:00
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns1.reg.ru.
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns2.reg.ru.

 ;; bailiwick:  3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.
 ;; count:      1
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-05-06T12:53:19+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-06T12:53:19+00:00
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns1.reg.ru.
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN NS ns2.reg.ru.

 ;; bailiwick:  3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.
 ;; count:      98
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-07T20:55:50+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-20T21:19:11+00:00
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN SOA ns1.reg.ru. hostmaster.ns1.reg.ru. 1617737377 14400 3600 604800 10800

 ;; bailiwick:  3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.
 ;; count:      2
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-07T20:55:50+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-06T12:53:19+00:00
 3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN MX 10 mail.plotoperation1.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.

 ;; bailiwick:  3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com.
 ;; count:      51
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-06T19:35:53+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-20T21:19:11+00:00
 plotoperation1.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN A 37.18.30.131

From these results, we can see that plotoperation1.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com has pointed to the same IP address for over a month.

Inverse queries

An inverse query can be used to find other domains and hostnames that have pointed to an IP address.

dnsdb inverse ip "37.18.30.131"

;; count:      1
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-07T06:06:16+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-04-07T06:06:16+00:00
 l291067a.justinstalledpanel.com. IN A 37.18.30.131

 ;; count:      51
 ;; source:     sensor
 ;; first seen: 2021-04-06T19:35:53+00:00
 ;; last seen:  2021-05-20T21:19:11+00:00
 plotoperation1.3eehj3wdhdhjww3r3dkjd.com. IN A 37.18.30.131

Pivoting

These results provided another domain to investigate, justinstalledpanel.com. Running a forward query on that reveals more infrastructure. the -o option will redirect output to a file in the format specified by the file extension.

dnsdb forward "*.justinstalledpanel.com" -o justinstalledpanel.com.csv

At the time of this writing, this returned 10,000 records, including 5 A records, 7 NS records, and 9,988 SOA records.

The high number of SOA records suggests that the domain is modified very frequently, because the SOA record is updated every time a DNS zone changes. So why are only a few other records returned? This is because DNSDB queries return a maximum of 10,000 results. In this case most of that 10,000 result limit is being used up by SOA records, which isn’t very useful. Unfortunately, there is no way to filter out just SOA records. Each record type will need to be queried separately.

For example, to only view A records, the command is

dnsdb forward -t A "*.justinstalledpanel.com" -o justinstalledpanel.com.csv

When running separate queries for each record type, queries for this domain returned the following record counts:

Type	Count
A	10,000+
AAAA	108
CNAME	0
MX	0
NS	7
SOA	10,000+
SRV	0
TXT	0

The results can be refined further by adding time boundaries. Time range arguments in dnsdb-python accept relative and absolute formats. For example, as of this writing there were 4,507 A record changes over the last 7 days.

dnsdb forward -f csv  -t A --last-seen-after 7d "*.justinstalledpanel.com" | wc
  -l
 
4509

In fact, there are about 184 A record changes every minute , which in a testament to the near real-time nature of the data provided by DNSDB.

dnsdb forward -f csv  -t A --last-seen-after 1m "*.justinstalledpanel.com" | wc
  -l

 186

Based on awhois lookup, It turns out justinstalledpanel.com is used as part of the domain parking infrastructure for publicdomainregistry.com, which explains why there are so many record changes so frequently.