Unlocking Threat Detection: ASN Monitoring Meets DNS Private Data Lakes

July 1, 2025
Unlocking Threat Detection: ASN Monitoring Meets DNS Private Data Lakes
Share on LinkedIn

DNS-based attacks have long been a mainstay of the cybercrime economy. However, when DNS infrastructure is fragmented, and teams work in silos, critical gaps in visibility emerge, increasing the risk of compromise.

Organizations can close these gaps and harden their DNS defenses by combining Autonomous System Number (ASN) monitoring with a centralized private DNS data lake. This integrated approach enhances DNS visibility, strengthens management capabilities, and improves overall resilience against DNS-based threats.

Understanding ASN Monitoring: What It Is & Why It Matters

Every business has an address, even in the digital space. While DNS is commonly called the internet’s address book, an organization’s autonomous system number (ASN) functions like its zip code; it identifies entire blocks of IP addresses that belong to a single network—such as an internet service provider, a cloud provider, or an enterprise network. Each ASN represents a group of IP routes that are managed and advertised together to the rest of the internet.

What does ASN Monitoring Do?

ASN monitoring double-checks ASN responses, confirming that the right ASNs are serving your business’ authoritative DNS records. The goal is to safeguard DNS traffic and ensure users arrive at their intended destination—your website.ASN monitoring also gives organizations insights into where DNS traffic is going, not just individual IP addresses but also the networks behind those addresses. This helps security and IT teams detect suspicious traffic, thereby improving their ability to spot and block DNS-based threats before they evolve into large-scale security incidents.

How ASN Changes Can Signal Malicious Activity

For example, unexpected ASN changes can be a red flag for domain hijacking or malicious redirection. If an organization’s traffic to www.example.com has consistently been routed through a U.S.-based cloud provider but suddenly starts resolving through an ASN in an unexpected region, that could signal that malicious actors have hijacked the domain or manipulated its DNS records. These shifts can expose customers to phishing sites, malware downloads, or credential theft without triggering alarms in traditional security tools.

Certain ASNs are infamous among infosec practitioners for hosting malicious infrastructure, everything from phishing sites and malware command-and-control (C2) servers to botnet operations. By tracking ASN reputation scores, security teams can quickly identify when DNS traffic begins flowing toward networks with a history of abuse.

Attackers also use evasive techniques like fast flux, rapidly rotating IP addresses, and even entire ASNs to avoid detection, evade blocklists, and prolong the life of malicious domains. When a domain suddenly starts resolving through different ASNs quickly, it’s often a strong signal of fast-moving, evasive activity commonly associated with botnets and advanced phishing campaigns. Organizations can stay ahead of cyberattacks and spot early warning signs of emerging infrastructure abuse by combining ASN reputation monitoring with the detection of flux patterns across ASNs.

The Power of a DNS Private Data Lake

One of the biggest challenges facing security teams is breaking down silos to enhance visibility and threat detection capabilities. In many organizations, DNS management responsibilities are divided across teams due to the complexity of modern IT environments. As a result, DNS data is fragmented, scattered tools with short-lived logs that are hard to piece together. The solution? Private DNS data lakes.

A private DNS data lake centralizes all historical DNS logs, reducing the burden of log retention and shortage and offering teams a centralized, enriched, historical DNS query store for both internal networks and external queries. This centralization creates complete visibility across an organization’s entire DNS ecosystem, enabling:

  • Cross-functional collaboration with shared, customizable dashboards and investigations across security, network, and infrastructure teams.
  • Proactive threat hunting using full-query context and historical patterns to uncover stealthy attacks.
  • Faster, more accurate investigations with DNS telemetry enriched by external threat intelligence (IP reputation, ASN mapping, domain risk scoring).
  • Reduced reliance on fragmented logs that miss key signals.
  • Improved security and compliance by providing an auditable record of DNS activity with long-term retention to support regulatory requirements and internal governance.

Enriching DNS Visibility with Advanced Context

DNS service providers, like UltraDNS, can further enhance DNS private data lakes by offering geographic and IP enrichment, subnet context, and providing data enrichment by region and domain name. For example, all DNS queries, whether from resolvers, authoritative servers, or edge devices, are ingested into the UltraDNS Data Warehouse. UltraDNS automatically resolves the client and response IP addresses to their respective ASNs, storing this metadata alongside Geo/IP information and subnet details in the UltraDNS Private Data Lake.

By adding this level of intelligence, organizations can make more informed security decisions, better prioritize their defensive efforts, and optimize their security spend. Enriched DNS data helps organizations understand global query distribution and identify security threats or misconfigurations.

The Power of ASN + DNS Private Data Lakes (And How to Get Started)

Modern cyber threats move fast, and legacy solutions like basic DNS logs, incomplete SIEM feeds, or firewall-based monitoring are insufficient to detect and mitigate these risks. By combining ASN monitoring with private DNS data lakes, organizations have the deep visibility they need to uncover evasive threats while dramatically reducing false positives.

Why ASN + DNS Telemetry Works Better Together

DNS queries alone don’t always tell the full story. When combined with ASN context, DNS data can reveal which networks are sitting behind DNS responses, potentially surfacing malicious infrastructure that would otherwise blend in with normal traffic. A private DNS data lake enriched with ASN data also provides teams with the long-term view necessary to identify sudden ASN hijacks, low-and-slow C2 traffic, and advanced evasion techniques that IP-based detections often miss.

Bridging Team and Data Silos

DNS visibility is a challenge for many organizations, with different teams owning a piece of the DNS management pie. The result? DNS telemetry is fragmented, with separate logs (some of which may have extremely short retention periods) and tools used by network operations, security teams, and infrastructure teams. While this approach may help streamline DNS record ticket queues, it leads to visibility gaps that make threat hunting difficult.

Private DNS data lakes close this gap by providing a centralized view of enriched DNS and ASN telemetry, thereby enabling collaborative threat hunting and incident response. As an added benefit, this also helps support compliance reporting for DNS-related risks, including regulatory audits, and internal governance

Why Organizations Need a Private DNS Data Lake, Not Just Logs

The amount of data generated and consumed in today’s digital world is too much for any one team to make sense of, so, most of it falls on the floor. Unfortunately, no organization can predict when a cyber attack will occur, and when they may need multiple years worth of historical log data as part of a forensic investigation.

Private data lakes provide teams with long-term retention options; capable of holding up to three years worth of data vs, only a few weeks or months. And, because the telemetry stays in your environment it can be normalized and enriched to enable advanced queries and trend analysis. And, with solutions UltraDNS Private Data Lake, organizations also gain geo/IP enrichment, subnet information, regional enhancements for even more actionable context for defending DNS infrastructure

Ready to Level Up Your DNS Security with ASN Monitoring + Private Data Lakes?

Your DNS log data holds a wealth of untapped insights. ASN monitoring paired with DNS data lakes closes the visibility gaps across teams, providing them with key insights into what’s happening on their network. Centralized DNS log data, enriched with ASN context enables teams to adopt a data-driven approach to threat detection.

UltraDNS Private Data Lake breaks down the barriers organizations typically face when trying to gain value from their DNS log data. Our private data lake helps ingest, store, and analyze historical DNS query data from across your infrastructure—giving security, networking, and operations teams a unified, queryable foundation for smarter decision-making.

Whether you’re looking to improve your online performance, enhance your security posture, or simply harness the power of your DNS data, UltraDNS Private Data Lake can help. Contact us today to learn more and schedule a demo.

Published On: July 1, 2025
Last Updated: July 1, 2025

Interested in learning more?

Experience Unbeatable Protection
Schedule a demo to see our cloud solutions
  • Solutions
  • Products
  • Industries
  • Why Vercara
  • Plans
  • Partners
  • Resources
  • Company