Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

The owner of EveryDNS, David Ulevich, has come out with an interesting new solution to phishing scams and domain name typos: fix it at the DNS level, which I found in an article at Wired.

The new service is free and it’s called OpenDNS.  You use it by changing the DNS server addresses on your maching, router, or wherever you get your DNS settings from to use their two DNS server IPs.  Then, they do some filtering to correct typos such as typing existdifferently.cm, which they automatically fix into existdifferently.com.  They also monitor sites that try to pull of phishing scams and block the addresses of the sites requesting your personal information, so even if you click the link in an email (such as “your PayPal account has been marked for fraud, come enter all your bank accounts, credit cards, and social security number at this link so we can rob you blind!”), if OpenDNS knows about it and you click on the link, you’ll be blocked and instead get a webpage similar to the screenshot shown here.

 

Where do they make their money? Eventually, they plan on offering advertising when you type in a domain name that doesn’t exist and they can’t correct.  For now, they just give you some search results.  This is different from VeriSign’s fiasco Site Finder (see the Wired article above for details), because you’re choosing OpenDNS, it’s not being forced on all internet users worldwide at the authoritative DNS server level!