We’ve been hearing some pretty exciting stories from our customers lately and (though we’d love to share them all with you) we’ve selected some of the most interesting to showcase right here on the blog. We’ll be sharing these unique use cases of OpenDNS Enterprise with you over the next few months in a new series we’re calling Field Reports.

We couldn’t wait to share the story of Shafer’s Tours, which flexibly accommodates custom charters and tours for nearly-endless East Coast and Mid-Atlantic destinations. Operating more than a dozen luxury motor coaches, and serving a wide variety of groups that charter the buses and join the tours, the Safer’s Tours IT team was faced with an interesting challenge: How do you secure the Wi-Fi hotspot on a moving target? The team exhausted countless ideas for how they could conserve precious bandwidth onboard the buses, and prevent malware from being downloaded over the network, but they continued to encounter the same two issues: Installing appliances on every bus is cost prohibitive, and no adjustments or monitoring could be made to the network while the buses were in motion.

As luck would have it, Tim Watson, IT manager and safety director for Shafer’s Tours, was separately evaluating OpenDNS Enterprise for use on Shafer’s Tours corporate network. He quickly realized that the unique way OpenDNS Enterprise handles content filtering and malware protection makes it the ideal solution for securing his moving targets, too. In no time, his team was able to set up OpenDNS on both Shafer’s Tours’ corporate network and the individual WI-Fi hotspots for the buses without installing any appliances or provisioning any software. And, because OpenDNS Enterprise settings can be changed remotely, and updates are delivered in real-time in the cloud, they don’t have to worry about waiting for buses to return to home base to make changes.

Since setting up OpenDNS Enterprise, the Shafer Tours IT team hasn’t looked back. But don’t take our word for it. The Shafer’s Tours IT team tells us, “OpenDNS Enterprise is the only service that makes sense.” You can read more about how Shafer’s Tours is using OpenDNS here.

If your company is using OpenDNS Enterprise to solve an interesting problem, give us a shout at Success@OpenDNS.com. We’d love to share it right here.

Technology user groups are awesome. That’s why OpenDNS is announcing a new program dedicated to celebrating the innovation and education taking place at user groups everywhere, and making life a little more delicious for their members. Even though programmers, engineers, IT professionals and SysAdmins are notoriously over worked and under appreciated, many still somehow find time to gather together, share insight and explore new tech tips on a regular basis. There are thousands of user groups around the world that are independently organized and run where people join to share hard-won knowledge and experiences and have a blast doing it.

Each month, OpenDNS wants to buy dinner for a different user group that’s focused on technology. It makes no difference to us whether your group discusses hardware or hacking, speaks JAVA, PHP or Ruby, prefers servers or the cloud, or is a Mac or a PC (or Linux/Unix/Other for that matter). All we care about is that you’re well-fed while you’re talking tech and that you’ve got plenty of caffeine to keep the discussions lively. And, we’ll provide plenty of sought-after OpenDNS stickers to pass around and a few t-shirts to give away!

If you’d like OpenDNS to help feed the hungry crew at your next meeting, just give us the basic details - how often you meet, how many members, focus for the group, helpful links, etc. – and we’ll take care of the rest. In addition to providing some hearty chow, we also want to feature your user group in an upcoming issue of the OpenDNS newsletter, so we can highlight your awesomeness for the masses. This is your chance to share details of your group with millions of OpenDNS users so go ahead and boast.

One of the best things about the OpenDNS Domain Tagging system is that it’s a community effort, and anyone who uses OpenDNS has the opportunity to get involved and make the Internet safer. Each day, the Domain Tagging Community is submitting, voting on and moderating thousands of domains into neatly organized categories. This makes it easier for parents, teachers, business owners and other OpenDNS users to get easy-to-use and comprehensive content filtering. You can read a quick synopsis of OpenDNS Domain Tagging here.

We’ve always tried to make the process of Domain Tagging so easy that anyone – from IT Pros to parents to academics – who wants to get involved can do so easily while committing as much or as little time a they’d like. And now we’ve taken that one step further.

Behold! The Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar!

Until just recently, voting on domains was done by visiting the OpenDNS Domain Tagging community page.  Now, with the help of the Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar, anyone can easily vote on domains on the fly!  The process is easy.

1. Get the OpenDNS Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar.
2. Choose how you’d like to vote on domains. You can either tag the domain you’re currently visiting or you can get more involved by switching to “Random Domain” mode.
3. Once you’re on the domain you’d like to tag, select from one of the 56 categories available from the drop-down menu.
4. Click “Vote Yes.”
5. Pro tip:  Clicking the “Auto-Cycle” checkbox will automatically take you to a new website to vote on once you cast your vote!

That’s all it takes to make the Internet safer! Once a domain gains enough votes, it moves its way into a separate queue where it is then reviewed and finalized by the OpenDNS team and our worldwide army of OpenDNS Domain Tagging Moderators.  The more votes you cast, the more you help to strengthen the OpenDNS Community and sharpen the content filtering blade.

It’s important that before you use the toolbar, you read through the category descriptions to make sure that you fully understand them and read through the toolbar info page for smooth sailing.

So come on down and cast some votes!  The more you vote, the more you help.  And the more you help, the stronger OpenDNS gets for 30+ million OpenDNS users around the world!

Today we unveil DNSCrypt, a new security tool we’ve developed that has been on our minds for a long time. It has a simple but important function: encrypt all DNS traffic between you and OpenDNS. Nothing else like it exists, and we have very high expectations for the positive impact it can have on the Internet security and privacy of millions of people around the world.

DNS is a critical part of the Internet’s infrastructure, and though a good deal of attention has been paid to improving its security in recent years with DNSSEC, an important part has been overlooked. It’s what’s often referred to as the “last mile,” or the connection between you and your ISP or your DNS provider, if you use a DNS service like OpenDNS. It’s in this “last mile” that bad things are most likely to happen — snooping, tampering, or even hijacking traffic. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can eavesdrop on your Internet activity and see exactly which domains you are resolving, and in many cases, what websites you’re visiting.

It happens all the time on insecure networks at coffee shops, and even residences. Some ISPs have even been accused of spying on their customers’ activity. What’s worse, the “last mile” is ripe for man-in-the-middle attacks, where an intermediary injects themselves into your traffic path masquerading as your intended destination, but all the while, being able to see and modify your traffic. This leaves little confidence for the Internet user.

DNSCrypt changes this and has the potential to completely revolutionize Internet security. DNS has, unfortunately, always had some inherent weaknesses because it’s transported in plain text. DNSSEC has never attempted to address that (crazy, I know). Encrypting all DNS traffic means a fundamental change to the security of the system on the whole and a strong improvement. It’s not the only solution, and there’s still an important place for verification and validation of domains like DNSSEC provides, but it’s a very strong first step.

We’ve been sharing DNSCrypt with security experts over the past several weeks and the feedback has been phenomenal. A tool like DNSCrypt is critically necessary to ensure the security of DNS going forward. DNSCrypt is a “technology preview” today, and the code is being open-sourced. For the über-nerds, our implementation is the first (known) implementation of the forwarder ideas expressed in the DNSCurve community, which many will recall, we were one of the first to implement.

Download DNSCrypt today and try it for yourself.

One of our most important goals at OpenDNS is educating people on Internet dangers so they can make informed choices on how to best manage their networks. Last week we released a phishing quiz, hoping we could show people just how difficult it is to spot the difference between a phishing site and the real website.

The quiz was designed to be difficult, but our users were hoping for something more than a challenge. The comments poured in, encouraging us to create a powerful educational tool that you could use to help teach people how to avoid getting phished.

You had our attention. Many of you, who know that cyber criminals can create exact replicas of real sites by simply copying the image and hosting it at a different domain, were frustrated that the quiz didn’t include URLs. Others, hoping to use the quiz to teach friends and family about the dangers of phishing, asked us to create something that showed why seemingly legit sites were actually phishes.

So, we incorporated your feedback into a new version of the quiz. We hope you’ll find this to be a useful tool to help people learn the dangers of phishing, and how to avoid them. As always, the easiest way to avoid getting phished is to use OpenDNS. That’s because OpenDNS runs PhishTank, the world’s largest community-powered online clearinghouse for phishing, and uses it to automatically block phishing sites for all OpenDNS users.

Take the quiz now!

OpenDNS moderators are Internet security superheroes that make sure our Web filtering is the safest and most useful it can be for millions of people around the world, and they are invaluable to Internet safety and the safety of our users. It’s a huge badge of honor to wear. So who are they and what do they do?

To better explain what a moderator does, let’s quickly revisit the process for how domain categorization works. First, someone submits a domain (or website) to be classified into the most appropriate of OpenDNS’s 57 categories. Users then vote on how the domain should be categorized.  After a certain voting threshold is reached, which varies from category to category, the moderator steps onto the scene.  Moderators thoughtfully review the websites, with their keen eyes and Internet prowess, and make a final decision on categorization. The domain is then “tagged” in the appropriate categories and blocked for anyone who has chosen to enable filtering of that category.

So what does it take to be a moderator? Well, you don’t necessarily need a Ph.D. in computer science, a job at NASA or fluency in HTML. Our current team of moderators is made up of people from nearly every profession, including (but not limited to) OpenDNS staff members, SysAdmins, software engineers and even stay-at-home parents. And OpenDNS moderators live in places all over the world, including India, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Switzerland and more. What they all have in common is a single passion for making the Internet safer by working together to ensure speed and accuracy in the domain tagging process.

If you think you’re a good fit, and want to have a vested interest in making the Internet a safer place, simply fill out the form below and we’ll contact you soon. It’s that easy

OpenDNS.com has been redesigned to make resources more readily-available, and offer more insight into why OpenDNS is the best way to secure your network from threats at the DNS layer.

Let’s go for a quick tour:

• The Technology section is brand new. Here we dive into how OpenDNS works, including details about our sophisticated Anycast routing technology and globally-distributed network. We also show you why OpenDNS is so fast and so reliable, and how our service has been designed from the ground up to ensure 100% uptime. The new section includes an interactive network map that tells you which of our 12 global datacenters is answering your DNS requests and stats about total DNS requests — per day and even per second.

• We made the Business Solutions and Home Solutions more obvious in order to get people to the information they need faster. Whether you’re a SysAdmin looking for information about how our malware protection works, a mom or dad looking for a straightforward way to keep kids safe online, or just want to sign up for Premium DNS, the new site is tailored to ensure your questions get answered in fewer clicks.

• The Resources section is a great place to find out who is using OpenDNS and how. Browse the customer showcase and get to know the trusted brands that rely on OpenDNS every day, meet our partners or find out why companies like yours are using OpenDNS. This section is jam-packed with case studies, data sheets and even an FAQ.

Last week I had the privilege of being in Washington DC to talk to a number of distinguished members of Congress along with top leadership from The Whitehouse to urge them to reject two pieces of legislation which would be detrimental to the Internet and to the United States economy.  

The two bills (Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives and Protect IP Act in the Senate) have a noble goal, reducing online piracy.  Unfortunately, these bills come at a terrible price – they will force the creation of a “great firewall of America” used to censor websites that are hosted outside of the US and they will burden Internet companies with liability and litigation that will force new jobs and businesses to be created overseas.

Below is a copy of letter I am sending to Congress today.  Please feel free to share widely and comment below.

Here’s a link to the non-flash embedded version: http://db.tt/GMGdcCLp

OpenDNS CEO Letter to Congress regarding SOPA / PIPA –