Protecting What You’ve Forgotten: Why Protective DNS Secures the Unknown Corners of Your Organization

Written by David Ratner | July 21, 2025

It’s a scenario more common than most organizations would like to admit: a server spins up to support a project, then never gets decommissioned. A SaaS subscription gets purchased on a credit card without IT involvement and quietly becomes business-critical. A vendor integration is set up and then over the years slips off the radar.

In complex, fast-moving environments, it’s easy to lose track of what you actually have. Shadow IT, forgotten assets, orphaned domains, and overlooked third-party relationships are endemic to modern enterprises. I’ve witnessed organizations sending requests for SOC-2 reports to vendors that they don’t use anymore, which highlights just how difficult it is to keep track of what is and isn’t active and being used. And when you don’t know something exists, and don’t know what is live and being used, you can’t patch it, monitor it, or defend it.

The risk isn’t hypothetical.
Many of the biggest breaches in recent years have exploited precisely these forgotten or invisible corners of infrastructure:

An unmaintained staging server left exposed to the internet.
An old API integration with excessive privileges.
A domain registered years ago and now lapsed into someone else’s hands.
A cloud bucket no one remembered to lock down.
A vendor integration that wasn’t known

Attackers don’t care if you forgot about it, and in fact they hope that you do — it’s still part of your attack surface.

Protective DNS: Defense That Doesn’t Rely on Perfect Asset Management

Protective DNS offers a powerful advantage: it doesn’t require you to know all your assets in order to protect them. Because fundamentally everything still uses your network for outbound traffic – including the bad actor that infiltrated and is now trying to communicate out for instructions, command-and-control, or even data exfiltration.

By enforcing policy and inspecting DNS queries for every device, user, and service that attempts to communicate out of your organization, Protective DNS creates a layer of defense that operates independently of your asset inventory.

Even if a rogue process on an unknown server tries to contact a malicious domain, Protective DNS will block the request, stopping the connection before any data can be exfiltrated, malware downloaded, or instructions given.
Even if an employee unknowingly uses a compromised SaaS platform, Protective DNS can identify the suspicious lookups and alert you — giving your security team visibility into behaviors and dependencies you didn’t realize existed.
And even if attackers compromise an old vendor integration and attempt to establish command and control, Protective DNS will see and disrupt the activity.

Visibility Into the Unknown

In addition to blocking malicious lookups, Protective DNS also gives organizations intelligence about their environment they often can’t get elsewhere.

When you look at outbound DNS logs, you can see:

Which assets are actively communicating (even the ones no one remembered).
Which vendors and SaaS platforms are in use (even if they were never formally approved).
Which domains and services might present risk based on reputation, category, or observed behavior.

This kind of visibility helps security teams close gaps, clean up forgotten infrastructure, and build a more accurate picture of their true environment.

You May Not Know Everything — But You Do Need to Defend Everything

Perfect asset management is a noble goal, but in practice, most organizations will always have something they didn’t catalog or monitor, or be slightly behind the curve.

Protective DNS helps you secure the infrastructure you forgot you had, the vendors you didn’t know employees were using, and the attack vectors you never imagined were part of your risk profile.

Because in cybersecurity, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you — and Protective DNS ensures it doesn’t get the chance.

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