Protective DNS: Harnessing DNS as a Core Weapon in MSSP Cyber Defense and Incident Response

The report promotes Protective DNS as a core, preventive control for MSSPs and SOC teams, arguing that DNS-layer policy and telemetry enable earlier threat interception, simpler investigations, and faster incident response. It highlights limitations of reputation-only approaches, explains how attackers use DNS for C2 and data exfiltration, and advises operational integration of DNS telemetry with SIEM/XDR for unified investigations. The piece concludes with a call to align incident response workflows around DNS logs and leverage predictive threat intelligence to act on newly emerging attacker infrastructure.