Our colleague Brian Cesaratto at Epstein Becker Green has a post on the Health Law Advisor Blog that will be of interest to our readers in the technology industry: "Harden Your Organization’s Domain Name System (DNS) Security to Protect Against Damaging Data Loss and Insider Threat."
Following is an excerpt:
Although there is no specific mention of DNS in HIPAA, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, the GDPR or State cybersecurity laws or regulations, including California, Massachusetts or New York, an organization cannot comply with those regulatory frameworks requiring reasonable network security safeguards without considering threats to DNS. The statutory requirements do not generally mandate the particular mix of cybersecurity controls required to protect DNS. Rather, the frameworks require organizations to implement formalized processes to anticipate and assess risks from cyber threats and then adopt reasonable safeguards. Organizations may reference NIST publications and other technical guidance for a catalog of controls to choose from based on the risk assessment. Consistent with the regulatory imperatives requiring vigilance and appropriate counter-measures to safeguard data when threats evolve, organizations should revisit their defenses given the recent threats to DNS.
Attackers seek to disrupt the normal operations of DNS servers and applications responsible for resolving domain names to properly route network communications between computers. DNS looks up the IP address of the computer to receive the communication based on its domain name and advises the computer requesting a connection of the associated IP address to send the request to. For example, when a user types “www.anycompany.com” in his or her web browser or sends an email (e.g., “tsmith@anycompany.com”) DNS resolves the domain name (“www.anycompany.com”) to a numerical IP address, such as 172.30.xxx.xxx. DNS advises the requesting computer of the IP address corresponding to the domain name and the requesting computer accordingly directs the traffic. ...