ATT&CK coverage › Technique
Application Layer Protocol: DNS T1071.004
Adversaries may communicate using the Domain Name System (DNS) application layer protocol to avoid detection/network filtering by blending in with existing traffic. Commands to the remote system, and often the results of those commands, will be embedded within the protocol traffic between the client and server.
Events covered
9 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 14 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (16 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (54 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 7 rules
- DNS Exfiltration and Tunneling Tools Execution
- DNS Query by Finger Utility
- DNS Query To Common Malware Hosting and Shortener Services
- Network Connection Initiated via Finger.EXE
- Silence.EDA Detection
- Suspicious Cobalt Strike DNS Beaconing - DNS Client
- Suspicious Cobalt Strike DNS Beaconing - Sysmon