Most IT teams treat domain security as a checkbox: an SSL certificate, a decent password on the registrar account, done. But the controls that actually stop domains from being hijacked, spoofed, or knocked offline sit one level deeper, and even well-resourced, security-conscious companies often skip them entirely. Not because the risk isn’t real, but because these controls live in an unfamiliar part of the stack, DNS and domain registration, rather than the applications and endpoints most security budgets are built around.
“We’ll get to it eventually” isn’t a company-size problem. It’s a default, and it’s usually the case whether the team is five people or five thousand.
Why the basics feel like enough (until they aren’t)
Most teams equate domain security with having an SSL certificate and a password on the registrar account. Both matter, but neither addresses how domains actually get hijacked, spoofed, or knocked offline: unauthorized transfers, DNS record tampering, and lookalike domains sending phishing email that looks legitimate because the real domain has no authentication policy telling mail servers to reject it. Those are DNS-and-registry-level problems, and SSL doesn’t touch them.
Where to start fixing them
- DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions). Cryptographically signs DNS responses so attackers can’t forge them. Widely available, rarely turned on, because it’s assumed to be complex to configure. Without it, nothing stops a bad actor from injecting fake DNS responses and quietly redirecting your traffic elsewhere, even if every other control is in place.
- CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) records. Specify which certificate authorities are allowed to issue certificates for your domain. Without one, any CA can issue a cert for your name — a narrow but real gap. That means a misissued certificate could let someone impersonate your domain with a browser-trusted padlock, and you’d have no record-level way to have stopped it.
- Registry lock. Adds a manual verification step before any change to your domain’s registration or DNS. It’s the single highest-leverage control against unauthorized transfers, and it’s also one of the most commonly skipped, even by companies that have the rest of their domain security in order.
- DNS redundancy. Running your DNS across more than one provider. If your sole DNS host goes down, so does your entire domain — email, website, everything resolving through it. A single-provider outage becomes a full company outage, not just a slow page load.
- DMARC at enforcement. Plenty of companies publish a DMARC record and stop there, sitting in monitor-only mode indefinitely. Monitoring doesn’t stop a spoofed email from landing in an inbox — only enforcement (p=quarantine or p=reject) does. In monitor-only mode, you’ll see the spoofing in reports after the fact, but recipients still get the fake email in real time.
Your quick scorecard
Before deciding where to start, it helps to know where you actually stand. Ask yourself, honestly:
- Do you know, without checking, whether registry lock is active on your primary domains?
- Is your DMARC record set to enforcement, or still sitting at p=none?
- Does your DNS run through a single provider, or multiple?
- Do you have CAA records published on your primary domains?
- Is DNSSEC enabled, or was it evaluated once and shelved?
A “no” or “not sure” to two or more of these puts you in good, if slightly exposed, company — most organizations land there. The point isn’t to fix all five today. It’s knowing which one to fix first.
See where your domain security actually stands.
101domain’s team reviews DNS, DMARC, and registry-level controls across your domain portfolio and flags the gaps that matter most.