Nominum-led Panel Discussion at BlackHat Focuses on the Agility and Coverage Depth of DNS in Discovering and Blocking New Malware

NominumTM, the DNS-based security and services innovation leader, announced today it is leading a panel discussion at BlackHat USA titled "DNS: An Agile Defense Against Diverse, Damaging Attacks." The panel of speakers features security researcher Nick Feamster, Professor and Deputy Director of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and Matthew Carothers, Principal Security Architect with a leading North American ISP, along with Nominum security experts Yuriy Yuzifovich, Head of Security Research and Data Science, and Pierre Ehsani, Senior Director of Product Management.

The discussion will shed light on the depth and breadth of cyberthreats that can be detected and analyzed using DNS data - all in a matter of minutes - when it is combined with machine learning and proprietary algorithms. While DNS performs an essential network service, connecting users with applications and services they seek, security related enhancements turn DNS into an agile defense that can protect consumers and businesses against a wide range of web threats.

The Nominum-led panel session takes place at 2:30pm PDT on Thursday, July 27, 2017 in Oceanside F, Level 2 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. More information can be found at https://www.blackhat.com/us-17/business-hall/schedule/#dns-an-agile-defense-against-diverse-damaging-attacks-8213.

"The vast majority of cyberattacks rely on DNS to be successful. By examining DNS traffic, it is possible to pinpoint the unique queries these threats use to carry out their exploits," said Yuriy Yuzifovich, Head of Security Research and Data Science for Nominum. "In fact, DNS data often detects malware faster, and finds more malware than alternative approaches like intensive forensic analysis of hosts. For devices like POS terminals and IoT gadgets that have little to no built-in security and are difficult to scan for malware, a DNS-based approach is highly effective."

Nominum Data Science uses anonymized service provider, commercial and public data sources, along with advanced predictive intelligence techniques to analyze over 100 billion queries daily. The team combines its unique visibility into worldwide real-time DNS data and a patent-pending, unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on a neural network, to pick up correlation signals between domain names. This technology helps discover obscure domains that cybercriminals use to hide behind multiple machine-generated domains, including Domain Generated Algorithms (DGAs).