Microsoft DNS Logs Parsing and Analysis: Establishing a Standard Toolset and Methodology for Incident Responders

Microsoft DNS request and response event logs are frequently ignored by incident responders within an investigation due to a historical reputation of being hard to parse and analyze. The fundamental importance of DNS to networking and the functioning of the Internet suggests this oversight could lead to a lack of crucial contextual information in an investigative timeline. This paper seeks to define a best practice for parsing, exporting and analyzing Microsoft DNS Debug and Analytical logs through the comparison of existing tool combinations to DNSplice, a purpose-built utility coded during the development of this paper. Findings suggest that DNSplice is superior to other toolsets tested where time to completion is a critical factor in the investigative process. Further research is required to determine if the findings are still valid on larger datasets or different analysis hardware.