Importance of DNS security in web3

Securing your domains and DNS records is of crucial importance for web3 projects. If a malicious party gains control over your DNS records, the result is that they can replace your website with an identical fake website, and everyone visiting your website URL will instead be interacting with the fake website. Outside of web3, malicious parties can use this approach to collect login credentials, but within web3, this type of website impersonation can lead to a direct loss of funds.

In order to illustrate how the industry is still lagging in implementing best practices, we built a tool to indicate which large web3 projects are using recommended domain registrars and which ones aren't. The data of which domain registrar websites use is publicly available, although knowledge about which registrars are recommended for web3 projects is domain-specific knowledge. The common attack vector that allows malicious parties to steal a domain and replace your website with a fake website is social engineering. By contacting the domain registrar company while impersonating the real owner, a malicious party can claim to have forgotten the account password and request access through alternative paths. Sometimes malicious parties even have inside access in the domain registrar company (either by infecting an employee's computer or by leveraging a connection with an employee), making it even easier to acquire control over the domain they desire. The domain registrars which made it DIFFICULT to gain control using these backdoor methods are the recommended options. Specifically, Cloudflare, AWS, MarkMonitor, and CSCDBS are suggested DNS registrars to use.