LOS ANGELES – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced in a press release that it was aware of several recent public reports regarding malicious activity targeting the Domain Name System (DNS).

We have no indication that any ICANN organization systems have been compromised, and we are working with relevant community members to investigate reports of attacks against top-level domains (TLDs). For some reporting on this issue, please refer to these sources:

• United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Emergency Directive 19-01: “Mitigate DNS Internet Tampering”, 22 January 2019.

• “Why CISA Issued our first Emergency Directive”, United States DHS CISA blog, 24 January 2019.

• “Global DNS Hijacking Campaign: DNS Record Manipulation at Scale”, FireEye, 9 January 2019.

• “Widespread DNS Hijacking Activity Targets Multiple Sectors”, Crowdstrike blog, 25 January 2019.

• “Statement on man-in-the-middle attack against Netnod”, Netnod statement, 5 February 2019.

• “Revisiting How Registrants Can Reduce the Threat of Domain Hijacking”, Verisign blog, 11 February 2019.

• “.nl not affected by global domain hijacking campaign”, Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland blog, 15 February 2019.

ICANN believes it is essential that members of the domain name industry, registries, registrars, resellers, and related others, take immediate proactive and precautionary measures, including implementing security best practices, to protect their systems, their customers’ systems and information reachable via the DNS.

We trust that DNS industry actors are already taking strong security precautions in your business. However, here is a checklist to consider.

• Ensure all system security patches have been reviewed and have been applied;

• Review log files for unauthorized access to systems, especially administrator access;

• Review internal controls over administrator (“root”) access;

• Verify integrity of every DNS record, and the change history of those records;

• Enforce sufficient password complexity, especially length of password;

• Ensure that passwords are not shared with other users;  

• Ensure that passwords are never stored or transmitted in clear text;

• Enforce regular and periodic password changes;

• Enforce a password lockout policy;

• Ensure that DNS zone records are DNSSEC signed and your DNS resolvers are performing DNSSEC validation;

• Ideally ensure multi-factor authentication is enabled to all systems, especially for administrator access; and

• Ideally ensure your email domain has a DMARC policy with SPF and/or DKIM and that you enforce such policies provided by other domains on your email system.

ICANN strives to be a trusted partner in the multistakeholder community, and engage in collaborative efforts to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet’s global identifier systems. For more information on ICANN’s role in the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet’s identifier systemsICANN strives to be a trusted partner in the multistakeholder community, and engage in collaborative efforts to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet’s global identifier systems. For more information on ICANN’s role in the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet’s identifier systems