What is a reverse DNS lookup? Can it be used when attacking a network?

Question

What is a reverse DNS lookup? Can it be used when attacking a network?

Answer 1

Hahaha no, you can't attack a network with a "lookup." DNS lookup just shows you the link between domain names and their wan IP.

Answer 2

Older security used the reverse hostname and user to allow access. This was called .rhosts. No one uses this anymore for the very reason it relied on reverse DNS.



The only other thing is if for instance some ACL relied on it for access (like you want to allow anyone in *.mydomain.com) but this is again considered "weak" authorization; you would not rely on it for anything important.

Answer 3

A DNS lookup is when you have a domain name and want to find it's IP address with the lookup. A reverse DNS lookup, as the name implies, uses the IP address to find the domain name.



So if you have a domain name example.com with the IP address of 1.1.1.1, you can do a DNS lookup of example.com and you'll get the IP address of 1.1.1.1 .



However, if you do a reverse DNS lookup, you type in 1.1.1.1 and you'll get example.com.



As for your second question, I'm not really sure about that.