22 FEBRUAR 2019
Alert Regarding Published Reports of Attacks on the Domain Name System
LOS ANGELES – 15 February 2019 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that it is aware of several recent public reports regarding malicious activity targeting the Domain Name System (DNS). We have no indication that any ICANN organization systems have been compromised, and we are working with relevant community members to investigate reports of attacks against top-level domains (TLDs).
For some reporting on this issue, please refer to these sources:
- United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Emergency Directive 19-01: “Mitigate DNS Internet Tampering”, 22 January 2019.
- “Why CISA Issued our first Emergency Directive”, United States DHS CISA blog, 24 January 2019.
- “Global DNS Hijacking Campaign: DNS Record Manipulation at Scale”, FireEye, 9 January 2019.
- “Widespread DNS Hijacking Activity Targets Multiple Sectors”, Crowdstrike blog, 25 January 2019.
- “Statement on man-in-the-middle attack against Netnod”, Netnod statement, 5 February 2019.
- “Revisiting How Registrants Can Reduce the Threat of Domain Hijacking”, Verisign blog, 11 February 2019.
- “.nl not affected by global domain hijacking campaign”, Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland blog, 15 February 2019.
ICANN believes it is essential that members of the domain name industry, registries, registrars, resellers, and related others, take immediate proactive and precautionary measures, including implementing security best practices, to protect their systems, their customers’ systems and information reachable via the DNS.
