DNS Intel with Dig in Cygwin

DNS Intel with Dig in Cygwin

Dig, short for domain information groper, is a simple command line utility often used for network reconnaissance.

Dig can be installed under Net -> bind (update: bind-utils) in Cygwin. Dig will use the default DNS settings (check ipconfig /all.) Once installed, if you want to hardcode the dig to a specific DNS server, launch Cygwin and create a resolv.conf file.

$ cat > /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver <your IPv4 address here>

Ctrl-Z and you are good to go. Dig can then be used for intel on a particular domain. For example, the website, mail servers, and DNS name servers.

$ dig www.jwgoerlich.us
$ dig www.jwgoerlich.us MX
$ dig www.jwgoerlich.us NS

Another option is attempting to do a zone transfer, either full (AXFR) or incremental (IXFR).

$ dig www.jwgoerlich.us AXFR
$ dig www.jwgoerlich.us IXFR

Transfers will create a full copy of all the records in the DNS domain. Typically, this command is used simply to validate that zone transfers have been disabled.

That is dig in Cygwin, in a nutshell.

Posted by