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Application & OT Security · Foundational

DNS Enumeration

Discovering hostnames, records and infrastructure details by querying a target's DNS.

Definition

Testers query record types such as A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, SOA and SRV, attempt zone transfers and brute-force subdomains. TXT records may reveal SPF includes and verification tokens for SaaS providers. Tools include dig, nslookup, host, dnsrecon and dnsenum.

Example

dig example.com ANY @ns1.example.com, then dnsrecon -d example.com -t brt

Exam tip

Know which record types reveal what: MX for mail servers, NS for name servers, SRV for services like LDAP and Kerberos.

Related terms