LinkedIn, the world’s largest social network for professionals, filed for an IPO this week. The move has made it the no-doubt most talked about technology company and the Wall Street Journal even referred to its shares as “America’s sweetheart tech stock.”

Many people find it hard to categorize LinkedIn because it’s unlike other social networks. It’s not Facebook, which people use to share personal information, to be sure. LinkedIn encourages people to build profiles limited to information about their professional lives only, and share the profiles by connecting to business contacts. Perhaps the most helpful use of LinkedIn is when a user is looking for a new job, and can use the site to market him or herself to potential employers and contacts who may refer them for jobs. But professionals also use LinkedIn to connect for their current company’s benefit. To identify appropriate contacts to forge partnerships.

So for a network admin, how do you think about LinkedIn? It’s not particularly bandwidth intensive, so it likely won’t slow your network. Do you feel compelled to restrict access during the workday because it’s a productivity inhibitor? Or do you see it as a business tool your users should be able to use freely?

We took a look at visits to LinkedIn during a one work-week period in May, Monday through Friday, in the United States, and the results were surprisingly consistent. (Time zones were normalized.) Overwhelmingly people visit LinkedIn the most between 8 am and 4 pm, with a dramatic decline during non-working hours.

There are several ways to interpret this data, but one thing is clear: people use LinkedIn during the workday. And almost exclusively during the workday. My expectation was that the numbers would point to more evening usage – folks spending non-work time polishing up their profiles and making connections, but that is clearly not the case. Next week we’ll take a look at Facebook visits and compare LinkedIn with Facebook. Perhaps some patterns will emerge…

For now you can better understand LinkedIn usage on your network during the workday by visiting your OpenDNS dashboard and checking for the site among your top domains.

Photo from IT-Networks.com.

As we take a deeper look at phishing across the OpenDNS network to better protect you and yours, we’ve uncovered some interesting patterns about the way Americans interact with phishing emails.

- The majority of clicks on known phishing links happen between 6 AM and 10 AM.

- The fewest clicks on known phishing links happen between 9 PM and midnight.

According to data from ConstantContact, a large email marketing company, the volume of email sent is highest between 10 AM and 2 PM. That means the volume of phishing emails in the morning might not be attributable only to the fact that phishing emails are being sent in the morning.

So what it is about the morning hours that’s got so many of us fooled? Perhaps we’re simply more susceptible, more easily fooled in the morning. Before we’ve had our coffee and gotten our day started. Perhaps it’s because morning is when we clean out our inboxes, looking over email that’s come in the night before.

Also interesting is that more clicks on phishing links happen in California than any other US state. The top five phish-clicking states are here, in order.

California

Texas

New York

Illinois

Florida

For context, this maps almost perfectly to state population. The only deviation is Illinois, which is actually the fifth largest state. So from this data one might conclude that we’re equally fool-able. Among the top five, no one state has a disproportionate number of phishing link clicks.

OpenDNS has been active in the fight against phishing for several years. We operate the largest clearinghouse of phishing data on the Internet, PhishTank.com, and provide the absolute best phishing protection around.

While we advise the absolute best protection against phishing is avoiding clicking links unless you’re 100% certain they’re safe, unfortunately many of us are fooled. And for good reason. The methods through which we’re phished have become dramatically more sophisticated in recent years. Early phishes appeared to come only from banks and financial organizations, but today phishes spoof gaming companies like Zynga, e-commerce sites like Amazon, government organizations like the IRS. And increasingly more and more phishes are what are commonly described as “spear phishes,” where some known information about you, the recipient, is used in the scam.

When you receive phony emails aiming to trick you from nearly every website and online service you use, using OpenDNS is more important now than ever.

Sifting through legislative literature can be arduous, and since we’ve already done the work we wanted to share a quick summary of what the White House is proposing around cybersecurity and how it might affect you. Please note: we are not taking a stance, but rather just aiming to help inform.

In the most recent session of Congress collectively both parties introduced 50 new bills related to cybersecurity. An indication a more cohesive plan and policy is needed, the President decided to draft a cybersecurity bill that addresses protecting the American people, America’s critical infrastructure and Federal Government computers and networks.

From the White House:

“It has become clear that our Nation cannot fully defend against these threats unless certain parts of cybersecurity law are updated [...] We have developed a pragmatic and focused cybersecurity legislative proposal for Congress to consider. This legislative proposal is the latest achievement in the steady stream of progress we are making in securing cyberspace and completes another near-term action item identified in the Cyberspace Policy Review.”

As for the “protecting the American people” part, the new Bill will standardize laws about notifying consumers in the event of a data breach. Today there are 47 different state laws in this area. It will also clarify laws around computer crimes. One of the key tools law enforcement uses today against organized crime is the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). But today RICO doesn’t apply to computer criminals. The Bill aims to change that and also sets mandatory minimums for cyber intrusions into critical infrastructure.

The “protecting America’s critical infrastructure” part is less clear. The new Bill will “enable” DHS to quickly help a private-sector company, state, or local government when that organization asks for its help. And it grants companies and governments immunity when sharing cybersecurity information with DHS and mandates “robust privacy oversight” to guarantee that the voluntarily shared information doesn’t hurt individual privacy and civil liberties. We look forward to understanding more in that area.

The Bill proposes a three-step process around protecting critical infrastructure like the electricity grid and financial sector:

1. Critical infrastructure operators would develop their own frameworks for addressing cyber threats.

2. Then, each critical-infrastructure operator would have a third-party auditor assess its cybersecurity risk mitigation plan.

3. A summary of the plan would be accessible, in order to facilitate transparency and to ensure that the plan is adequate.

According to the Bill, in the event the process fails to produce strong frameworks, DHS, working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), could modify a framework. And DHS can also work with organizations to help them fix plans that are deemed insufficient by auditors.

As for “protecting Federal Government computers and networks,” the Bill will do a lot of different things. For one, it will formalize the responsibility of DHS to manage security for the Federal Government’s civilian computers. (It’s DHS’s responsibility today technically, but it’s not a formal relationship.) This includes also overseeing intrusion prevention systems for all Federal Executive Branch civilian computers.

Not falling squarely into these three primary buckets but interesting nonetheless, the Bill will also prevent states from requiring technology companies build datacenters in that state, allowing companies a bit more operational flexibility than they have today.

How does this affect you and your privacy directly? The Bill specifically states certain privacy and civil liberty measures:

- DHS would have to develop cybersecurity practices with help from and review by privacy and civil liberties experts and get them approved by the Attorney General.
- All monitoring, collection, use, retention and sharing of information is limited to protecting against cybersecurity threats.
- If a private-sector business, state, or local government wants to share information with DHS, it must first make reasonable efforts to remove identifying information unrelated to cybersecurity threats.

More about the bill from the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times.

OpenDNS Moderators. Let’s talk about them. Who are they? Are they ninjas? Do they ever sleep? Well, I can’t tell about the Moderators without first explaining the Domain Tagging system. Please allow me…

The Domain Tagging system, as it stands, is set up somewhat like an assembly line. First, domains are submitted by you and thousands of people like you, to be grouped in one of our 56 different categories. Once submitted, other people (but you can do this too) then vote whether or not it belongs in the category to which it’s been submitted. Once the domain reaches a vote threshold it’s moved into moderation.

This is where the OpenDNS Moderators come in.

Once the domain reaches the moderation queue, moderators are responsible for reviewing and making the final say about whether or not the domain belongs in the category. They very carefully review the voting results, use their sound judgement and Internet excellency, and of course, visit the website itself before making a final call. If approved, the domain is then added to the category and blocked for all OpenDNS users who’ve enabled filtering of that category.

So who are these moderators and how do I become one?

OpenDNS Moderators are invaluable to our users, and invaluable to Internet safety and security. They work in academia, as IT technicians, software engineers and as security researchers and some are even stay-at-home moms turned Internet security superheroes. There are OpenDNS Moderators in nearly every country, from Kenya to India to Canada to Brazil to Switzerland. The volunteers work together to ensure speed and accuracy in domain categorization and ensure OpenDNS content filtering is the absolute most useful it can possibly be to millions of Internet users around the world. They’re identified throughout the community by a badge that’s located next to their OpenDNS username.

You don’t have to be a security expert to be an OpenDNS moderator. All that’s absolutely required is a desire to help make the Internet better. An enjoyment of exploring the deluge of new websites continuously emerging on the Internet doesn’t hurt, either.

If this sounds like you, we’d love for you to join the team. Do you have what it takes? The application process is easy and open-ended. Just let us know why you’d make a great addition.

Your seat in the OpenDNS Moderator’s chair awaits.

Vinny LaRiza is the community moderator at OpenDNS, where he works with mods around the world to ensure speed and accuracy in OpenDNS Domain Tagging. Contact him at vinny@opendns.com.

Every few weeks there’s a new scam that makes the rounds on Facebook. This week it’s the “Find out who visits your profile,” scam, which we’ve all seen before. The reason it piques my interest this time is the sheer volume of people falling victim. That coupled with the fact that the victims include some of my more tech-savvy Facebook friends made me want to understand better what exactly the virus is trying to do and how we can all protect ourselves.

The virus works first by gaining access to your Facebook account. Unlike other methods for hacking, which involve somehow accessing your login credentials, this scam needs only for you to click a link posted on your wall or someone else’s wall. To entice you into clicking, the scam offers something lots of people would love to know, but Facebook doesn’t allow: a list of people who’ve viewed your profile. You might receive an e-mail notification that tells you a friend has posted a link on your wall with this context:

“LOL !! Me cant believe that you can see who is viewing your profile! I can see the TOP 10 people and I am really OPENMOUTHED that my EX is still checking my Pix and my Profile. You can also see WH0 CHECKS YOUR PR0FILE here)”

The most important thing to understand about this scam is that you should not click the link. If you don’t click the link and opt-in, the virus is rendered powerless. If you click the link, and you happen to be logged into your Facebook account when you do, the virus immediately goes to work posting the same link and content on your friends’ walls. There’s no way to stop it in progress – the only way to repair the damage is to visit each of your friends’ walls one-by-one and remove the post, or message all and hope they haven’t already clicked the link, as well.

Since there’s an email component to the virus for those who’ve elected in their Facebook settings to be notified via email when someone posts to their wall, we’ve seen a surge in submissions of this scam to PhishTank, the anti-phishing clearinghouse we operate. However, this will not be confirmed as a phish because it acts entirely within Facebook. Note the domain for the below submission is Facebook’s: fb.me

Within social networks users are largely accountable for their own safety. The primary thing to remember: if you have any doubt, don’t click the link. Facebook offers this bit of advice:

“Always use caution when clicking on a link or opening an attachment, even if it’s been sent or posted by a friend or other reputable source. If you have any doubt, get confirmation directly from the sender. Be especially wary of messages that include attractive offers or urgent requests, and watch out for links that require you to immediately provide a login and password.”

This morning we opened up our IPv6 Sandbox, starting with the most important piece – a globally-distributed recursive IPv6 DNS service. This means if you have IPv6 connectivity, you can now talk to us over native IPv6 transport. Instructions for getting started are over in the sandbox.

Why is this important? As more and more end-users get IPv6 connectivity, many continue to use IPv4 DNS servers. Many of these IPv4 recursive DNS servers don’t have IPv6 connectivity, meaning they can’t talk to other DNS servers over IPv6. As IPv6 adoption increases and content begins to appear that is only accessible over IPv6, it’s critical that people use DNS servers which are able to talk over both IPv4 and IPv6.

This is the first of a number of exciting new announcements we’ll be making over the coming months. If you have IPv6 connectivity, I hope you’ll try out our IPv6 DNS servers and let us know what you think. There isn’t support yet for filtering or dashboard management, but that’s coming soon. We wanted to get this in front of folks now, well ahead of World IPv6 Day on June 8th.

Now we just need a “You’re using IPv6″ button to go along with our Sweet OpenDNS button.

Use this button on your site!