Infoblox has released its 2025 DNS Threat Landscape Report, revealing a dramatic surge in DNS-based cyber threats and the growing sophistication of adversaries leveraging AI-enabled deepfakes, malicious adtech and evasive domain tactics.
Based on pre-attack telemetry and real-time analysis of DNS queries from thousands of customer environments—with over 70 billion DNS queries per day—the report offers a comprehensive view into how threat actors exploit DNS to deceive users, evade detection and hijack trust.
“This year’s findings highlight the many ways in which threat actors are taking advantage of DNS to operate their campaigns, both in terms of registering large volumes of domain names and also leveraging DNS misconfigurations to hijack existing domains and impersonate major brands,” said Dr. Renée Burton, head of Infoblox Threat Intel. “The report exposes the widespread use of traffic distribution systems (TDS) to help disguise these crimes, among other trends security teams must look out for to stay ahead of attackers.”
Since its inception, Infoblox Threat Intel has identified a total of over 660 unique threat actors and more than 204,000 suspicious domain clusters, meaning a group of domains believed to be registered by the same actor. Over the past 12 months, Infoblox researchers have published research covering 10 new actors. They have uncovered the breadth and depth of malicious adtech, which disguises threats from users through TDS, driving industry thought leadership in this topic.
This report brings together findings from the past 12 months to illuminate attack trends, equipping security teams with critical knowledge to keep their edge over bad actors. Particularly, the report sheds light on adtech’s role in these attacks.
Top findings
- Of the 100.8 million newly observed domains in the past year, 25.1 percent were classified as malicious or suspicious.
- 95 percent of threat-related domains were observed in only one customer environment, underscoring the challenges to the security industry to detect and stop threats.
- 82 percent of customer environments queried domains associated with malicious adtech, which rotate a massive number of domains to evade security tools and serve malicious content.
- Nearly 500k traffic distribution system (TDS) domains were seen in the last 12 months within Infoblox networks.
- Daily detection of DNS Tunneling, exfiltration, and command and control, including Cobalt Strike, Sliver, and custom tools, which require ML algorithms to detect.
Uptick in newly observed domains
Infoblox Threat Intel identified 100.8 million newly observed domains, with over 25 percent classified as malicious or suspicious. Over the year, threat actors continuously registered, activated and deployed new domains, often in very large sets through automated registration processes. By increasing their number of domains, threat actors can bypass traditional forensic-based defenses––which are built on a “patient zero” approach to security. This reactive approach relies on detecting and analysing threats after they have already been used somewhere else in the world. As attackers leverage increasing levels of new infrastructure, this approach becomes ineffective––leaving organisations vulnerable.
Actors are using these domains for an array of malicious purposes, from creating phishing pages to deploying malware through drive-by downloads, to engaging in fraudulent activities and scams, such as fake cryptocurrency investment sites.
The Need for Preemptive Security
These findings underscore a pressing need for organisations to be proactive in the face of AI-equipped attackers. Investing in preemptive security can be the deciding factor in successfully thwarting threat actors. Using predictive threat intelligence, Infoblox’s protective DNS solution blocked 82 percent of threat-related queries before their initial impact.
Proactive protection, paired with consistent radar on emerging threats, tips the scales in favor of security teams—allowing them to pull ahead of attackers and interrupt their unlimited supply of domains.
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