New Tool Shields Organizations From NXDOMAIN Attacks

The report describes NXDOMAIN (DNS Water Torture) DDoS attacks—how they generate large volumes of queries for nonexistent domains to exhaust DNS resources—and discusses defenses including traffic monitoring, threat intelligence, Anycast, and Akamai’s Shield NS53 which extends Edge DNS protections to on-prem deployments. It advises documenting DNS architectures, integrating DNS protections with broader DDoS mitigation and threat intelligence, and following CISA guidance such as enforcing MFA for DNS administrators and monitoring certificate logs.