After we published our 2010 year-end report, a number of people asked us why PayPal was targeted so frequently by online scammers — it stands out as one of the most phished brands in our report by a wide margin. In reviewing how we presented our data, it’s clear that we should have provided a few more datasets and some better explanations of where our data comes from for clarity.

One of the reasons PayPal is so prevalent as a target in PhishTank is because PayPal uses the PhishTank API to automatically submit any phish they find to PhishTank. This is a good thing — it puts data into PhishTank quickly so the community can verify the sites and PhishTank data feed subscribers can protect their users. While this highlights the frequency that PayPal is a target, it also skews the data to make it appear that PayPal, Inc. is the most phished site, simply because they are the most vigilant in submitting data to PhishTank. Obviously, this was not our intent. We’ve updated the report (PDF, Scribd) to show the most targeted brands in 2010 with the PayPal API data removed from the dataset, as nearly all other submissions come from the tens of thousands of PhishTank individual contributors.

As PhishTank continues to grow, we want to encourage other brands to follow PayPal’s lead in using the various PhishTank APIs to submit data alongside the submissions from individual users. In order to do that, we need to create an environment where brands don’t feel their participation in PhishTank is a double-edged sword. We sincerely appreciate PayPal’s participation in PhishTank, and in their fight against phishing. They should be commended for their progress in fighting phishing and keeping their users safe.

If the PayPal API-based submissions to PhishTank are removed from the dataset of phished brands, the list of most-targeted brands in 2010 shifts dramatically:

 1. Facebook                    8.64%
 2. HSBC Group                  6.73%
 3. World of Warcraft           5.35%
 4. Internal Revenue Service    4.87%
 5. Sulake Corporation          3.21%
 6. Bradesco                    3.15%
 7. PayPal                      3.03%
 8. Orkut                       2.90%
 9. Steam                       1.95%
10. Tibia                       1.72%
n=72,404

You can read the full report here (PDF) or on Scribd.

To learn more about submitting data to PhishTank via the PhishTank API, visit the PhishTank FAQ page.

When we look back at 2010, one of the things we’ll remember is how ubiquitous social became online. Facebook exploded, Twitter grew up, people “checked in”, and almost every website seemed to develop some sort of social component.

Not surprisingly, people using OpenDNS — parents, IT administrators, sysadmins, district technology heads — noticed the same thing. Data collected on how people used Web content filtering in 2010 shows this fact: Facebook is the #1 most blacklisted site. And interestingly enough, it’s also the #2 most whitelisted site. Other sites that were frequently blocked include MySpace and YouTube.

Not surprisingly, Facebook was also a frequent target of online scammers. When we analyzed submissions to Phishtank in 2010, we saw that Facebook was the second most frequent website targeted by phishing websites. The #1 target for 2010 — and throughout every month of the year — was PayPal. PayPal accounts for an incredible 45 percent of all online phishes.

These statistics and more can be found in a report we’re publishing today, all about the Web content filtering and phishing data we saw in 2010. I encourage you to download it and read through it. There’s some fascinating information included in the report, including which sites are the most frequent target of online scammers, how businesses are filtering content, and what categories people most frequently block on their networks.

You can download the full PDF report here: http://www.opendns.com/pdf/opendns-report-2010.pdf

We’re always working to make OpenDNS even easier to use, and we’re happy to roll out some improvements today that make accessing all of the features and statistics you rely on even easier. Users logging in to their OpenDNS Dashboard today might notice a few cosmetic changes: we’ve added a new “Home” tab that neatly summarizes all the networks you’ve added to your OpenDNS account and serves as a launching pad for making settings changes or viewing statistics for those networks quickly.

All of the features and settings you’ve come to expect from OpenDNS are still there, and they’re all in the same places you used to access them. We’ve just added a new homepage that makes accessing those parts of the Dashboard a little bit faster.

We’ve rolled out one other change to our community pages today as well. When you visit our blog, forums, IdeaBank, or other community pages for the first time, you’ll be prompted via a pop-up window to choose a display name, if you haven’t made that choice already in the My Account tab of your Dashboard. This change allows users who signed up for OpenDNS with their email address as their username to keep their email address private while interacting with the OpenDNS community. Here’s what it will look like when you are prompted to pick a display name:

If you haven’t yet, login to your OpenDNS Dashboard and check out the facelift. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Yesterday we hit a milestone big enough and important enough to share. In just 24 hours we successfully answered more than 20 billion (!) DNS queries, doubling the number we handle per day since April of this year when we announced 10 billion.

Why is this important? Because our rapid and steady growth is an indication of the demand for a rock-solid reliable and intelligent DNS service that not only makes your Internet faster and more reliable, but safer and smarter too. We now have more than 15 million users around the world. More than 25,000 schools in the U.S. choose OpenDNS to keep their kids safe online, and included in that number are some of the country’s largest school districts. Companies ranging from small mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 100 enterprises are switching in droves to OpenDNS for Web content filtering, DNS security and DNS resolution.

2009 was an exceptional year for OpenDNS, but the next year is poised to be even better. In 2010 we’ll be adding more server locations and more server capacity to make our international coverage even better. We’ll give you new features that allow more customization of how OpenDNS works for you. And, we’ll work hard to keep DNS innovation synonymous with OpenDNS.

Thanks for helping us get to 20 billion. I’m confident 50 billion is closer than it may seem.

How do you understand big numbers?

OpenDNS does ~3 billion DNS requests daily, with around 450 billion all-time so far. Big numbers, but tough to comprehend.

Recently, we changed the stats number at the top of every page of our website from the all-time number to requests/per second. This number moves around, but recently has swung between 37,000 – 41,000 requests per second.

OK… sounds impressive, but again, what should you compare the number to?

How about the volume of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)?

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal ran “After Crash, NYSE Got the Message(s)” on the front page of the Money & Investing section (C1 in print).

In reading the article (in case it’s not available when you click… WSJ.com requires payment at some point), we learn:

On Feb. 27, 2007, messages flowed in at a rate of 15,000 per second. The exchange quickly thereafter doubled its capacity to 38,000 messages a second. As markets fell in August when credit markets seized up, the NYSE was getting as many as 28,000 messages per second. This time, systems held up without a major hitch, but the volume of messages prompted [NYSE CEO]Mr. Thain to call for an increase in capacity to 64,000 by year’s end. [Emphasis added]

So, even at its top volume in August, the NYSE volume of messages wasn’t matching the volume of DNS requests our customers make each day. And its capacity currently falls short of ours.

Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges, but we like to think that your DNS requests are as important (almost?!) as those buy-sell messages.

OpenDNS has plenty of headroom, and we’re adding more to support our growing customer base… and to stay ahead of the NYSE!

Earlier today, OpenDNS resolved its 300,000,000,000th DNS request. That’s two months after hitting 200 billion, and five months after resolving our first 100 billion. In the past two weeks, we’ve been resolving more than 2 billion requests daily (stats).

All of us want to thank our customers for making OpenDNS the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. With zero downtime (system status).

Our users tell us they want power and intelligence. Or rather, our users want intelligence about their network and the power to make changes.

Today we’re taking it up a notch, turning your OpenDNS Account into a comprehensive Dashboard which gives you a more precise understanding of your DNS traffic. The ability to gain insight into your DNS traffic and then have the tools to act without needing to install any software or buy any appliances is a huge win that every IT administrator in the world will enjoy. On top of that, it’s completely free.

Until today, we had a rudimentary (and rickety by our standards) stats system that would show you only a birds-eye view of your data. For instance, you could view a top-line number of total DNS requests and your top 10 domains per day. If you wanted to know the 11th domain, you were out of luck.

Want to know how many DNS requests you are doing each day? Want to know what your top domains are? Want to block sites easily all in an intuitive interface? Done, done and done. Now, you can get the count of every domain looked up on your network, over any period of time. View the data as a chart, a table or drop a CSV file into Excel. This is your data.

I like to think that the OpenDNS Dashboard is like Google Analytics for your DNS.

In the coming days and weeks you will see the Dashboard grow in functionality as we offer more ways to interpret your data. For those concerned about any privacy implications related to this new launch, I’d encourage you to read our post. Learn how we’re now storing less data about our users than ever before and giving you full control over what data we keep.

Thanks to our new Dashboard, OpenDNS is the rock solid, reliable DNS that is safer, faster, smarter and now gives you near-real-time statistics and trends about what’s happening with your network. Let us know what you think!

Yesterday, OpenDNS resolved its 200,000,000,000th request. That’s 200 billion with a b.

Thank you to our many customers for making OpenDNS the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. It’s been less than 3 months since we responded to the 100 billionth request. We’ve averaged more than 1 billion requests/day for that period. On Thursday, OpenDNS responded to 1.4 billion DNS requests (stats).

All that, with zero downtime (system status), thanks to multiple servers spread across five geographically distributed locations connected by multiple Tier 1 telco providers to deliver an amazingly fast, reliable Internet experience no matter the size of your network.

Come on in! Get started.

The magic numbers:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220