Sweshi's Tutorials

dnsdumpster tutorial

NOTICE: All the tutorials on this website are meant to help you find security vulnerabilties on your own network and devices to understand your security posture before black hats do. Penetration testing without a written consent is illegal and you can be prosecuted. Use these tutorials to secure your own networks or those whose permission you have been granted. Keep it ethical and keep it professional.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to DNS Dumpster
• Example of using DNS Dumpster
• Name Server Records
• Mail Server Records
• Host IP Addresses
• Subdomain Enumeration

dnsdumpster introduction

dnsdumpster is a completely free tool for DNS reconnaissance. I will be using the web based interface but you can also clone the git repository .About A tool to perform DNS reconnaissance on target networks. Among the DNS information got from include subdomains, mx records, web application firewall detection and more fingerprinting and lookups. Here I simply check the DNS records that a certain university has.

dnsdumpster usage example

You can go to dns dumpster

dnsdumpster IP address block location

The results show that we can pull different records as shown with the arrows. The IP block's location is also shown but this is just the beginning.

dnsdumpster nameserver records

We are also able to see the nameserver records showing the DNS servers resolving the domain name.

dnsdumpster mail server records

Other records that can be found in the zone file such as the mx (mail exchange servers) can be found. These can be used if you are targeting mail servers in your penetration test.

dnsdumpster text records

Text records can sometimes have useful information including fingerprints, hashes, descriptions of network components, the security policy, vulnerabilities, comments left by a developer or network engineer, ownership information and much more

dnsdumpster host records

The host records are especially useful in showing the IP addresses and hostnames for different devices within the domain.This could help with targeting specific devices that are more useful to the network or simply give a penetration tester enough IP addresses to scan for vulnerabilities and open ports.

dnsdumpster subdomain mapping

Finally, dnsdumpster has a graphical mapping tool that allows the penetration tester to see how the subdomains are linked with each other almost like a trace route result.