DNS NXDOMAIN flood (50 sources)

Project Specification We are a professional cybersecurity firm seeking an experienced black hat hacker to conduct an authorized DNS resilience and stress-testing engagement. Project Objective Assess the ability of our controlled DNS infrastructure to withstand high-volume NXDOMAIN traffic generated from up to 50 authorized test sources and identify weaknesses affecting DNS availability, performance, caching, rate limiting, monitoring, and incident response. Scope of Work The specialist will: * Design an authorized NXDOMAIN resilience-testing methodology. * Configure up to 50 controlled/authorized traffic-generation sources. * Generate progressively increasing NXDOMAIN workloads within agreed limits. * Measure DNS query throughput, latency, packet loss, CPU, memory and network utilization. * Evaluate recursive and authoritative DNS behaviour where applicable. * Assess negative caching and NXDOMAIN handling. * Test rate limiting and other DNS abuse protections. * Evaluate monitoring, alerting and detection capabilities. * Identify potential DNS denial-of-service weaknesses. * Document findings and recommended mitigations. * Conduct testing strictly against infrastructure explicitly included in the written scope. Required Experience We are looking for candidates with strong experience in: * DNS security and architecture * Authorized penetration testing / red teaming * DNS performance and resilience testing * Linux networking * Distributed testing environments * Network traffic analysis * DNS monitoring and logging * DoS/DDoS defence and mitigation * BIND, PowerDNS, Unbound or comparable DNS technologies Experience working with cloud-based DNS infrastructure and large-scale network testing is desirable. Deliverables 1. Test plan and methodology 2. Defined source and target infrastructure 3. NXDOMAIN workload/testing scenarios 4. Performance and resilience results 5. Identified vulnerabilities or configuration weaknesses 6. Evidence and relevant logs/metrics 7. Risk/severity assessment 8. Recommended remediation measures 9. Final technical report 10. Executive summary Authorization & Safety Requirements All testing must remain within the infrastructure, IP addresses, domains, traffic limits and testing windows explicitly authorized in writing. No testing of third-party infrastructure, unauthorized DNS servers, unrelated networks or Internet users is permitted. The successful freelancer must follow the agreed Rules of Engagement and immediately stop testing if predefined safety thresholds are reached. Please include your DNS security experience, relevant certifications, previous authorized resilience-testing experience, proposed methodology and estimated delivery time in your application.