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FREE Phishing Protection/Web Filter: OpenDNS
One free service that we use at Secure Surfinig Organization is elegant in its simplicity and highly effective for more than fraud protection.
OpenDNS is entirely free and works by having you set your DNS server addresses to OpenDNS's servers. If you don't know what this means, they have very clear step-by-step explanations to get you up and running.
If you still cannot figure out how to set your system, you can ask for help in their forums or send a note to us at labs@securesurfing.org and we'll walk you through it.
DNS means "domain name server" or "domain name service." When you type a web address into a browser, or your e-mail client goes out to connect to pop.someisp.com, the internet has to know where you are trying to connect. Every computer on the internet actually has a physical "internet protocol" (IP) address and it is these numeric addresses that make everything work.
So when you type www.securesurfing.org, your computer sends that domain name to a domain name server. The DNS then looks up the numeric address for that domain name and returns the address to your computer which then completes the connection. This happens for every web site you visit, every ad that is delivered to your system, every connection you make.
OpenDNS has come up with the ingenious idea that they can filter known scum at the DNS level.
So if you click on a link in an e-mail message that you thought was from your bank but actually is trying to trick you into going to a forged site, when you click on the link your machine sends the request to OpenDNS. OpenDNS checks the site request against a list of known bad sites -- which is added to every day. When it sees that this is one of those fraud sites, it simply refuses to make the connection and instead returns an error message to you.
This is highly effective because fraud sites are caught somewhere by someone fairly quickly. The problem is that the knowledge is not easy to get out to everyone, particularly not in a way that everyone can protect themselves.
Secondly, OpenDNS gives you the option to block more than phishing sites. You can set it up to block known pornography sites or even customize it to block individual sites that you do not want people (kids) in your home visiting.
Down sides? We can only think of one reservation. By definition for this service to work it must at least for a short time be aware of every web site you visit. This is also true of your existing internet service provider (ISP). So ultimately you have to trust the Privacy Policy of the provider, in this case OpenDNS.
Their business model is to generate revenue from users using their search engine at http://guide.opendns.com in the same way that Google and Yahoo! generate revenue from sponsored search results. I can't imagine they are earning a fortune in such a competitive field, dominated so completely by Google, but that is their stated revenue source. Frankly the service itself should be marketable to businesses, although OpenDNS explicitly grants permission to commercial enterprises to use the service at no charge.
SSO is pretty paranoid and our suspicions about Google remain without reassurance. But the OpenDNS Privacy Policy is relatively strong and the risks to your privacy are relatively trivial. Moreover, we routinely recommend that security conscious users should subscribe to a reliable and reputable anonymizing service
. If you do that then your IP address is masked from everyone, including OpenDNS.
We are sufficiently comfortable with our review of this service to heartily recommend it to Secure Surfing Organization members and users.
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