OpenDNS, use it
You really owe it to yourself to start using OpenDNS for three reasons: it’s free, it’ll speed up your web surfing (a little), and it will help protect you against phishing attempts, drive-by downloads, and other evil things created by the evildoers of the Internet.
The last reason is the most important, especialy now. In case you hadn’t read the news, the domain name system (DNS), which is basically the address book of the Internet, is fatally flawed. And this week an exploit was released to take advantage of this flaw. The flaw allows evildoers to “poison” a DNS server’s data with phony addresses, which allows them to “hijack” domains to make you think you’re browsing the site you see in your address bar when really your browsing the evildoer’s site. Imagine this happening to your bank’s website and you start to see the problem. Usernames, passwords, anything you enter and submit into web forms all go to the evildoer. Game over.
There are patches for the DNS flaw, but many Internet Service Providers, even the big ones like ATT, haven’t fully deployed the patches yet. OpenDNS is fully patched. So if you switch to OpenDNS now, you’ll be protected right away.
Try out OpenDNS for a week or two and see if you like it. I bet you will. (And, no, I’m not being paid by OpenDNS to write this. I just think it’s a great service.)
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