FREE Phishing Protection
One free service that we use at Secure Surfing Organization is elegant in its simplicity and highly effective for more than fraud protection.
NOTE: you are not even required to register or sign-up with OpenDNS to use their service.
OpenDNS is entirely free and works by having you set your DNS server addresses to OpenDNS’s servers, 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. If you don’t know what this means, they have a very clear video with step-by-step explanations to get you up and running.
DNS Settings in XP -- you can leave the IP Address at automatic or whatever IP you need.
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 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 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/employees) in your home or business visiting.
This service is superior to the multitude of link checking or so-called safe surfing alternatives. Many of these alternatives come as a feature of an internet suite, or part of an anti-virus package. The issues they raise include slowing down browsing speed because every link requires not only a dns look-up, but a connection to the vendor site to check the domain name against the vendor’s “bad” list. Some of the biggest names have already demonstrated a sloppy or overzealous approach to building list, banning for example a site that was about sextuplets because it contains the three letters “sex.” And, because these vendors are fully commercial operations, we are not how confident we can be that users entire browsing records will not be used for other commercial purposes.
OpenDNS suffers none of these weaknesses and allows very detailed control over what it does or does not block, if you want to sign up for a free account.
Down sides? We can only think of one reservation. Like the others, 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.
We are sufficiently comfortable with our review of this service to heartily recommend it to Secure Surfing Organization members and users.
