Autoencoder Is All You Need: Profiling and Detecting Malicious DNS Traffic
Palo Alto Unit 42 details an autoencoder-based method that profiles DNS traffic to detect C2 and malicious domains, blocking ~374,000 malicious DNS requests daily.
Unit 42 built an RNN-based autoencoder that compresses DNS traffic time series into fixed-dimensional 'DNS profiles' for each domain and device. Downstream classification, clustering, and anomaly detection modules flag suspicious domains, capturing 170 emerging suspicious domains in May 2024. Signatures block roughly 374,000 malicious DNS requests daily and run in the Advanced DNS Security service, with detections shared to Advanced URL Filtering. Case studies link DNS traffic patterns to C2 beaconing, dynamic DNS abuse, and DNS tunneling for data exfiltration.
40