Domain Internet Groper - technical definition

A flexible, easy-to-use tool used by system administrators for interrogating DNS name servers and interpreting their replies. This tool performs DNS lookups and then displays the answers returned from the name servers that were queried. Crackers like to run the Dig command to query the BIND DNS server, in particular, to determine what servers from the Internet Software Consortium are vulnerable.

Here is what a system administrator would type: dig @server type. Here, “server” is the name or IP address of the server to query—an IPv4 or an IPv6 address. When the server argument is a hostname, the Domain Internet Groper (Dig) resolves that name first and then queries the name server. If no server argument is given, the Domain Internet Groper goes to /etc/resolv.conf and queries the listed name servers. The response from the name server that reacts is displayed. “Name” is the name of the resource record to be looked up, and “type” indicates what kind of query is required.

See Also: BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon); Domain Name System (DNS); Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6); Server.