It’s July 1, and at OpenDNS that means opening day for SysAdmin Appreciation Month. If you recall last year we made a big decision: SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which is July 25, is not enough. We need an entire month to show our SysAdmin love.

This year we’re doing the SysAdmin Awards a bit differently. There are four categories, in addition to the highest honor, SysAdmin of the Year 2008. The SysAdmin of the Year 2008 will be selected from the submissions to the four categories.

Nominate yourself, or nominate a peer. If you’re reading this, and you aren’t a SysAdmin, I can guarantee you benefit from a SysAdmin, so take a moment to recognize him or her. This is your chance to acknowledge the SysAdmin who keeps your Internets running.

Rules for nominations are simple. Send an e-mail to awards at opendns.com, indicate which category you’re nominating for in the subject line and tell us why your nominee deserves glory. Judging will be done by OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch (a former SysAdmin himself) and the all-star operations team of George Patterson, Bill Fumerola and Jesse Davidson. The deadline for submissions is midnight on July 22, the night before the OpenDNS SysAdmin Appreciation Party in San Francisco. The real prize is the sheer honor that comes with being selected, but winners will also receive a $50 American Express gift card and be announced right here on this blog. The 2008 SysAdmin of the Year will get $200, a winner’s package of OpenDNS clothing and schwag and a spotlight on our Web site. This is the real deal.

So without further ado, your 2008 OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards categories are:

Best Disaster Response Award

A hurricane, a fire, an earthquake. A datacenter meltdown. Something that would have caused business operations to shut down completely, if it weren’t for this SysAdmin. Like a knight in shining armor, this SysAdmin managed to keep the network up and running.

Unbelievable Uptime Award

SysAdmins take pride in total uptime and this SysAdmin’s router has been up for years. Heck, it’s been up so long he/she might not even remember where it is. Wow the judges with a number of straight days of uptime.

Shoestring Budget Award

This SysAdmin works wonders with a seriously tight budget. Tell us about the SysAdmin with the craziest buildout done on the cheap. We need details for this submission - tell the judges specs, total cost and what kind of awesomeness it powers.

Flying Solo Award

Even with a team of talented operators, SysAdmin’ing is not easy work. But when flying solo it can be downright heroic. Regale us with a (true) story of the heroic sysadmin who saved the world (or did something awesome).

That’s it SysAdmins. Good luck.

We just posted PhishTank statistics for April 2008. No major surprises: The United States is, for the thirteenth straight month, hosting more phishes than any other country; A group of large banks, eBay, and PayPal round out the top most spoofed brands; And the PhishTank community of submitters and verifiers continues to have an impressively high accuracy rate.

The headlines tell us the phishers are not giving up. Seemingly every week we see reports of a new type of phishing scam. This week it’s Google AdWords phishing, where AdWords account holders are sent emails alerting them their account needs updating. The account holder logs into the spoofed AdWords interface and hands over their credit card information.

The AdWords phishing scam is interesting to me largely because, in lots of cases, it’s targeting businesses. People understand identity theft. But what happens when a business’s identity is stolen? There’s no easier or more efficient avenue to get reimbursed for a business than for an individual. Basically, whether you represent yourself or your company, you have to go to your credit card company and beg for forgiveness. (Whether or not it should be the banks — some of the most commonly spoofed brands — that are responsible for reimbursing money stolen through phishing is part of a separate debate.)

And the spoofed AdWords account interfaces, at least the ones I’ve seen, are good. I can easily understand how the marketing person tasked with managing AdWords for their company could be fooled. I know plenty of small and mid-size companies that rely on online advertising to drive traffic to their site, and see huge dents in revenue when something goes wrong and the traffic doesn’t come. That marketing person has plenty of incentive to make sure their account information isn’t wrong and nothing is preventing potential customers from seeing their ads.

Experts repeat the same warning about AdWords phishing that we’ve all heard about phishing in general for years: Educate yourself about phishing and look skeptically at URLs. Remember that as a general rule, you won’t be warned via e-mail that your account has been compromised, so if you are ever encouraged via e-mail to login to an account and update information, proceed with caution and look closely at the URL you’re encouraged to click.

Take for example, one of the AdWords phishes someone submitted to PhishTank. See the “d0l9i.cn” in the middle of the URL? If you open a new window and load http://adwords.google.com/select/login, you’ll see the real site’s URL doesn’t include that series of characters. That should be a red flag.

[NOTE: This is a known, verified phishing site. We recommend you do NOT visit it.]

OpenDNS users and users of other services leveraging PhishTank data — McAfee, Opera, Yahoo! Mail, Kaspersky Labs, to name a few — have an extra line of defense when it comes to phishing — they benefit from PhishTank and the wisdom of the community. But it’s abolsutely a good idea to learn to look for inconsistencies in URLs and think twice before providing sensitive information online, whether it’s your own or your company’s.

Today kicks off the March Madness basketball tournament and in case you haven’t heard, CBS is broadcasting all 63 NCAA games live - and free - on the Internet. All you need is broadband to tune in.

What makes this particularly relevant to YOU is the fact that many of the games are being played during the workday.

According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, network admins are blocking the site(s) broadcasting the games because they’re concerned all that streaming video is going to slow down their networks. Unlike the reasons you might block adult sites or social networking sites, there’s nothing inappropriate or unsafe about the NCAA tournament. But without question if several people on your network were watching the games, it could slow things down.

The SJ Mercury is doing a poll, asking people if video is blocked where they work. Right now it’s almost a tie between yes and no answers.

Are you blocking the games?

(If you aren’t and want to, it’s as easy as signing into your account and adding NCAASports.com to your block list. )

Admittedly, I was late to the game.

When I finally created a Facebook account +/- one month ago, I was shocked to see all of the people from various phases of my life who’d beat me there. There were childhood friends, high school and college friends, colleagues from all of the different professional positions I’ve held, even family members. I was hooked right away. I know it’s not a competition, but my 86 Facebook friends definitely make me more invested in the site.

What’s more, my job as community manager of OpenDNS is to do just that - have a hand in everything that touches our awesome community. Imagine my surprise to find the group OpenDNS is the Stuff with forty-something members and a moderator whose name I didn’t recognize. (No doubt the coolest Facebook group. If you haven’t yet joined, you really should.) The fact that the group was born outside of our doing is great, but just because I didn’t build it didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I scanned the members, got familiar, intro’d myself to the moderator. And these things take time.

This is all ironic, of course, since I work for a company that blocks Facebook for thousands of businesses, organizations and households around the world. We did a survey recently and found that Facebook was the No. 2 most blocked domain on OpenDNS-using networks. (I’ll give you three guesses what the No. 1 most blocked domain was.) Since I’ve been using Facebook I’ve seen that the site is not unsafe for adults like me. No, not at all. But it does make me unproductive. Someone in my position, with my enthusiasm for Facebook, could easily pass a few hours during the workday tending to their account.

When we launched Web content filtering we weren’t sure who, besides parents and network admins at schools and libraries, would use it. Not everyone wants to be a censor. But I think my Facebook fixation and my acknowledgement that [me + work + Facebook = work not done] is pretty representative. When you’re on the clock, sites like Facebook can be a serious distraction. What you do on your own time, off the clock, is up to you.

Does this sound familiar?

You labor, with the best of intentions, to keep everyone on your network safe and their comings and goings secure, only to be met with successful attempts to bypass your efforts? Well, we have a new feature for you today, and it might make some 14-year old kids cry a little.

We now let you block Web-based proxy sites.

We added a new category to our Adult Site Blocking functionality called “Proxy/anonymizer.” This category, like the other adult site categories, is provided by our friends at St. Bernard.

Here’s how we describe the new category:

Proxy/anonymizer

Sites providing proxy bypass information or services. Also, sites that allow the user to surf the net anonymously, including sites that allow the user to send anonymous emails.

If you are blocking most adult sites, you probably want to block Web-based proxies too. Like Adult Site Blocking, this is free, too.

As usual, this was added in response to your awesome and helpful feedback. Thanks for using OpenDNS.