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My First Cartel Meeting (and What It Taught Me About DNS)

Vriti Magee | Oct 8th 2025

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Quarterly earnings from command and control. Illustrated by DALL·E

Tech Field Day events are certainly not conferences. I didn’t expect my first cartel meeting to happen in Santa Clara.

But there I was at Security Field Day 14, coffee in hand, listening to Infoblox’s Mukesh Gupta talk about Prolific Puma and VexTrio — names that sounded more like a late-night docuseries than a DNS presentation.

Prolific Puma runs a malicious URL-shortening empire with about 75,000 domains registered in the past two years, a supply chain for scams, fake gift cards, and phishing kits. VexTrio is a rogue ad-tech network that launders malware through compromised publishers. Together they illustrate the organised infrastructure behind today’s attacks.

I came for architecture. Instead, I got organised crime with better branding.

That’s when it clicked: Infoblox isn’t chasing malware; it’s tracing the suppliers.

“Why play whack-a-mole with street dealers when you can shut down the cartels?”

Somewhere in the session came the line that framed everything:

“There’s a DNS query before something bad happens.”

Every attack — phishing, command-and-control, exfiltration, even prompt injection — begins with a DNS lookup. Block that query, and the malware never finds its destination.

For years, DNS has been treated like plumbing: necessary, invisible, and blamed only when it blocks or leaks.

Protective DNS turns it into a pressure valve for the whole security stack. When organisations switch it on, they report a 50 percent reduction in firewall traffic — not because the network broke, but because the bad stuff never left the building.

🛠️ Architectural View: Where the Controls Live

Most security tools add layers; this one uses the layer we already have. Protective DNS lives inside the resolver — the connective tissue between every user, device, and workload. Because DNS is universal, you simply flip a switch at the resolver and protect users, IoT devices, and cloud workloads without new agents.

Universal DDI unifies DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management across on-prem and cloud.

It manages native DNS services (Route 53, Azure DNS, GCP DNS) and introduces Universal IPAM / Asset Insights to discover cloud subnets and dangling DNS records.

“One query path. One enforcement point. One set of logs.”

🛠️ Architectural View: How the Detection Works

The threat-intelligence model targets infrastructure suppliers (“cartels”) rather than single IOCs.

Infoblox now tracks about 204,000 cartels, with more than 100 named. That long-view approach produces a 68-day average lead time on detecting new malicious domains — with a 0.00002 percent false-positive rate.

🛠️ Architectural View: How It Fits the Stack

Because DNS is the first hop, upstream tools do less work. Firewall and SIEM events drop sharply once bad DNS is blocked “at the source.” And when adversaries pivot to raw IPs, Infoblox shares complete threat feeds — DNS, IP, URL, and hash data — so customers can enforce at the firewall or XDR level.

“Protective DNS becomes a filter before the flood — not another dashboard after it.”

Predictive by Design

Inside the Infoblox portal, Predictive Intelligence isn’t a slogan — it’s a live dataset.

During the demo, Kevin Zettel displayed a feed of around 17–18 million suspicious records that evolve into confirmed threat categories as cartels activate. Each record is tracked from creation through classification, showing how threat infrastructure forms long before attacks reach users.

🛠️ Architectural View: Metrics That Matter

Zettel paused on a dashboard metric labeled “First to Detect.”

This view measures how long Infoblox identified a malicious domain before the wider community — typically 55 to 60 days, and in some cases up to 68 days earlier than VirusTotal or other public feeds.

It’s a deceptively simple KPI that quantifies what “predictive” actually means in operational terms:

“how much earlier Infoblox knew before you clicked.”

The metric reflects the benefit of DNS telemetry at scale — tens of billions of daily queries generating early signals of malicious infrastructure. For customers, it becomes a real-world measure of lead time: the gap between knowing and needing to respond.

Final Thoughts

Protective DNS isn’t a new layer; it’s a new vantage point.

“Start at the first query and you change the story that follows.”

There’s a DNS query before something bad happens. Once you understand that, prevention stops feeling like reaction — it becomes design.

🔍 Links for Further Reference

Watch the full Security Field Day 14 sessions:

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