Cybersecurity tax on DNS servers are one of the most significant threats to Internet security today
and it is important to understand how it works.
DNS domain name server is used to resolve names to IP addresses.
When you type google.com in your web browser.
Behind the scenes your computer is doing a DNS look up to find the IP address of the Web site that you're
trying to connect to.
You can almost compare it to saving a phone number as a contact in your phone.
So when you want to call someone on your cell phone instead of actually typing in their actual phone
number every time you just pull up your contact name and then hit call and it resolves the contact name
to the phone number that you have store in your phone contacts and in the background you're actually
calling that phone number and not the contact name.
Just like with networking even though in our web browser we're typing in Google dot com we're actually
in the background connecting to Google dot com IP address.
So why not go directly to the IP address.
You may ask yourself well for users it is a lot easier to remember a name like Google dot com instead
of the actual IP address.
DNS is built around a hierarchy of servers at the top level is the root servers that own anything once
a root server receives the request it sends the response back to direct the requester to the right server
based on a top level domain.
You need to reach like dot com or dot org.
Then the top level domain server will direct the requester to the owner of the domain name like Google
for example.
Here's what a DNS request for Google dot com would look like.
Within the hierarchy of domain name servers.
So you can see an example of a DNS request in my terminal here.
I'm going to ping being dot com and in the background I have wireshark running and it's filtering to
only capture packets that match DNS server requests.
So when I ping this my computer should sign a DNS look up requests to my DNS server.
Ok so you can see that my computer sent a DNS request to my DNS server at 10.0 up 3.3.
And then my DNS server responded with the IP address for the domain name that I request.