DNS Calculation

Tactics: command-and-control

Adversaries may perform calculations on addresses returned in DNS results to determine which port and IP address to use for command and control, rather than relying on a predetermined port number or the actual returned IP address. A IP and/or port number calculation can be used to bypass egress filtering on a C2 channel. One implementation of DNS Calculation is to take the first three octets of an IP address in a DNS response and use those values to calculate the port for command and control traffic.