Lab 17. Dig
Lab Objective:
Learn how to use Dig to gather DNS information.
Lab Purpose:
Dig stands for Domain Information Groper. It is a tool for querying DNS
nameservers for information about host addresses, mail exchanges,
nameservers and related information.
Lab Tool:
Kali Linux.
Lab Topology:
You can use Kali Linux for this lab.
Lab Walkthrough:
Task 1:
Dig is a tool which can be used on either Linux or Mac OS. Dig comes pre-
installed on Kali Linux and you can check its version using the following
command:
dig -v
The dig syntax looks like the following:
Dig [server] [name] [type]
We will begin by performing a simple dig command. Type the following into
a terminal:
dig google.com
Task 2:
The above command will include several information. There may be a time
when you only want the result of the query. This can be achieved in dig with
the following command:
dig google.com +short
As you can see, there can be more than one IP for a host record.
Task 3:
This next command will get rid of all information before the answer section,
for easier reading. We can specify this using the following command:
Task 4:
We can also specify the nameservers we wish to query using the following
command:
This command queries the “google.com” record from the Name Server with
IP address 8.8.8.8.
Task 5:
If we want to query all DNS record types, we can use the “ANY” option.
This will display all the available record types in the output:
Task 6:
We can also look up a specific record. For example, if we want to get only
the mail exchange section associated with a domain, we can use the following
command:
dig google.com MX
We can query a number of specific record types using the following tags in
place of MX:
TXT, CNAME, NS, A
Task 7:
We can trace the DNS path, similar to traceroute, using the following
command:
Task 8:
It is also possible to make DNS queries for IP addresses.
Task 9:
Dig has a useful feature which allows you to perform a number of DNS
lookups for a list of domains instead of doing the same for each one
individually. This can be done by performing a lookup using a file:
dig -f domain_names.txt +short
Task 10:
It is possible to access domain verification data by making a DNS TXT
query.
Dig is a tool with multiple uses and can be very useful for gathering a broad
range of DNS information about a target site.
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