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The NSA’s June 2026 update is guidance for organizations choosing a Protective DNS (PDNS) service—not an endorsement of a provider. The publication is an NSA information sheet; CISA, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), separately operates the federal government’s Protective DNS Resolver Service. For enterprise buyers, the practical message is to check a service against your own devices, network design, response processes, and data requirements, while keeping control of which resolvers those devices use.
What did the NSA’s June 2026 update say?
The NSA’s official publication is titled “Info Sheet: Selecting a Protective DNS Service (June 2026 Update).” Its landing page identifies it as version 1.5, document number U/OO/117652-21, PP-25-1066. The available description says the information sheet explains PDNS benefits and risks and assesses several commercial providers against reported capabilities. It also places responsibility on each organization to evaluate its architecture and needs and validate that a provider meets them.
That is selection guidance, not a government certification or a recommendation to buy a particular product. NSA and CISA said in their March 2021 announcement that their provider information was intended to help customers assess fit and did not recommend or endorse a product. The June 2026 update should be read in that context: use it to inform due diligence, not as a substitute for checking a provider in your environment.
What is Protective DNS, and how does it block malicious domains?
PDNS applies threat intelligence and policy at the DNS resolution layer. When a device asks a resolver to translate a domain name into an address, the resolver can compare that domain with information from open-source, commercial, and government threat feeds, categorize it, and block queries to domains identified as malicious. Depending on the service and its configuration, it can also log suspicious queries for investigation.
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NSA and CISA’s March 2021 description identifies potential defenses against phishing, malware distribution, command-and-control activity, domain-generation algorithms, and unwanted content. The core benefit is that a blocked lookup can interrupt a connection attempt before the device reaches the identified domain, while query records can help security teams investigate what happened.
What PDNS can and cannot do
PDNS is one network-defense layer, not a guarantee that all malicious traffic will be stopped. Its decisions depend on what the service can identify and how its policies are configured. It addresses DNS lookups; it does not make every connection safe, eliminate threats delivered through other means, or replace endpoint, network, and incident-response controls.
Blocking also creates an operational trade-off: a domain misclassified as malicious can disrupt legitimate work. A useful evaluation therefore covers not just detection claims, but how the provider handles categorization changes, false positives, customer review, and restoration of access when a block is wrong. Query logs can aid investigations, but their usefulness depends on whether the organization’s analysts can access and act on them.
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How to choose a Protective DNS service
Use the NSA’s service-selection guidance as a prompt for verification. Ask providers for evidence and test the answers against your actual architecture; a feature list alone does not establish that a service covers your users or supports your response process.
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Threat intelligence and blocking behavior
- Identify the service’s threat-intelligence sources and how often information is updated.
- Ask how domains are categorized, what policy controls are available, and what happens when a domain is blocked.
- Confirm the process for reporting and resolving false positives, including how quickly legitimate access can be restored.
Device and network coverage
- Map which endpoints and networks will use the service, including office, cloud, remote, roaming, and standalone devices.
- Determine how coverage is enforced when a device is away from the corporate network or cannot reach an on-premises resolver.
- Check whether the service fits local DNS requirements and the organization’s existing security controls.
Logs, privacy, and investigation
- Establish what query and alert data the provider records, who in your organization can access it, and how it supports investigations.
- Review retention periods and how customer data is used. Do not assume that logging, retention, or data-use terms are the same across providers.
- Check whether the alerting and investigation data can be used by the teams and workflows responsible for responding to incidents.
Resilience and operational fit
- Validate resolver performance and uptime against the provider’s stated service commitments and your own requirements.
- Understand what happens during an outage, including fallback behavior and whether fallback resolvers preserve the organization’s intended protections and oversight.
- Confirm how the service works with the organization’s approved encrypted-DNS configuration and resolver-management controls.
Why resolver governance matters—even with encrypted DNS
Encryption and PDNS address different parts of DNS security. DNS over HTTPS (DoH) can protect DNS queries from eavesdropping and manipulation while they travel between a device and a resolver. PDNS applies threat intelligence and policy at the resolver. Encryption alone does not identify or block malicious domains, and the use of encryption does not mean a resolver provides PDNS.
The enterprise still needs to decide which resolvers its devices may use. NSA’s January 14, 2021 announcement on encrypted DNS warned that unmanaged DoH can bypass enterprise DNS defenses and stated: “NSA recommends that an enterprise network’s DNS traffic, encrypted or not, be sent only to the designated enterprise DNS resolver.” In practice, the approved DNS path should remain under administrative control whether it is encrypted or not.
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How CISA’s federal service fits the story
CISA launched its Protective DNS Resolver Service in September 2022. CISA’s 2024 FAQ describes coverage for federal civilian executive-branch organizational networks and standalone devices regardless of network location, including on-premises, roaming or nomadic, and cloud settings. That is the federal service context; it should not be confused with the NSA’s commercial-provider selection information sheet or treated as a general prescription for every organization.
CISA’s July 2024 fact sheet reported the following service figures. They are historical figures for CISA’s service, not verified measurements for September 2026:
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| Queries secured | An average of 1.6 billion daily | CISA fact sheet, July 2024 |
| Resolver uptime | 99.999% | CISA fact sheet, July 2024 |
These are not the same figures as those in NSA’s March 4, 2021 announcement about an NSA PDNS pilot with the DoD Cyber Crime Center and Defense Industrial Base participants. That release said the pilot examined more than 4 billion DNS queries over six months and blocked millions of connections to identified malicious domains. Those pilot results are not CISA service statistics.
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How this fits into broader DNS security
NIST Special Publication 800-81 Revision 3, “Secure Domain Name System (DNS) Deployment Guide,” was published in March 2026, superseding Revision 2 from 2013. It provides deployment guidance for securing DNS protocols and infrastructure, mitigating misuse and misconfiguration, and supporting zero trust or defense in depth. Its subject areas include DNS logging, DNSSEC, encrypted DNS, PDNS, and recursive name servers. NIST posted a planning note about potential errata on July 10, 2026, so organizations implementing technical details should consult NIST’s current publication and errata information.
The stakes are broader than a single resolver feature: the NIST abstract states, “An attack against the DNS infrastructure of an enterprise threatens every network operation in that enterprise.” PDNS selection is therefore one part of DNS governance—alongside secure resolver configuration, logging, and the controls that ensure enterprise devices use the intended DNS path.
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