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OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm
Linker3000 writes "According to The Register, OpenDNS plans to introduce an new service that will prevent PCs infected with the Conficker (aka Downadup) malware from contacting its control servers, and will also make it easy for admins to know if even a single machine under their control has been infected by Conficker: 'Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.' With the amount of trouble this worm has caused, perhaps this is a good time to take a look at OpenDNS if you haven't done so already."
Heh, didnt they cash in enough on the Kempinsky non-disclosure-scare already, getting a large user base for their information trading business (heh, as if they offer costly service "for free". Get real! It'll cost you no money but your privacy.) /. the platform for pusing bogus services?
OpenDNS redirects www.google.com to OpenDNS servers.
They make money by monitoring your habits. Can any one tell me how they pay their CDN and caching servers bills for millions and millions queries everyday? They sale your private info.
OpenDNS redirects all your Google search queries though their servers.
They redirect web browser users or scripts accessing nonexistent domains to a page containing sponsored search results, ads, and a search form. The DNS protocol requires that a query for a nonexistent domain must return the "NXDOMAIN" error response.
You're giving another entity access to all your DNS lookups and your computer won't talk to Google's servers anymore when you connect to www.google.com, but to a company which isn't very upfront about this redirection. Whether that's an advantage or a drawback is up to you.
I'm not sure why people around here seem positive about using OpenDNS (as opposed to running your own say).
When I make a type I get an Address Not Found error and THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT.
Nice idea, but what do you do when a worm alters your dns settings?
OpenDNS can't block access if the queries go to a server controlled by the bad guys.
You can firewall off access to dns ports to all but known servers, but then the worms just tunnel through a port 80 proxy.
Cat and mouse forever. Plus a false sense of security.
Well if this is censorship (and that's debatable) then it's "opt-in". Personally I have no problem with that, as long as you know and have opted FOR it, then that seems fine.
The biggest problem with censorship is it distorts your ability to know the truth - if you say: "Don't show me this or that" you still have the ability to know the truth, you're just choosing what you see and what you don't. But we do this everyday, we read one newspaper over another, we listen to particular commentators over others - we all self-censor.
Freedom of speech is very important, but there are exceptions. For example, we don't have the right to watch child porn in a crowded theatre, because that would harm children.
We don't have the right to hijack music vessels on the high seas because it would harm the corporate interests that sheltered us when we were still huddled around dark fires, marveling at shadows on the cave wall.
I fully support OpenDNS's sensible actions, or "sens-orship", as I like to call it. Surely we can trust any corporation with "open" in the title to control our minds in a way we will soon be programmed to approve of.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
You can turn this feature off. http://www.opendns.com/support/article/244 is their response to questions about privacy.
For those that have OpenDNS running, you go to Settings, Advanced and then at the bottom there is the Network Shortcuts section. Uncheck the box "Enable OpenDNS Proxy".
I have the service and I am quite happy to trade a little privacy for the content filtering done by someone else, without requiring any software installs or any maintenance of IPTables or anything else on my part. It is passive safety, I know, but gives some peace of mind with a teenager who knows his way around computers. It blocks proxies too. If there is an alternative, I'd love to read about it.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Try openerdns.org
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Except, OpenDNS is not a budding geek or regular office wank type tool.
It's a tool that requires you to know what you are doing. There are all sorts of subtle problems that can crop up, so I have at this point just simply refused to help any of my clients until they switch back to their regular ISP's DNS. Amazingly, a good 50% of the certificate and "cant find web site" errors go away after that. Imagine!
OpenDNS has the right idea, but it's not ready for the "everyday internet user" crowd yet.
This is without really considering the massive privacy problems with using it.
Agree'd. The "Open" in their name is misleading. In reality many consider OpenDNS to be a scam operation.
Furthermore nobody should rely on a DNS provider (of all things!) to report worm infections. The idea is so wrong, it reminds me of the TV scams where they want to sell you a worthless product, bundled with 5 other, totally unrelated worthless products. "Buy this quality home-trainer for only $499 and you'll get this USB-stick, a bar of soap, two lightbulbs and a chinese ipod-knockoff, for free!".
If you're concerned with worm infections then you run antivirus software and maybe an IDS (e.g. snort) on your internet gateway.
Both will report malicious traffic much more reliable than OpenDNS because that's what they're designed to do.
.....instructs its drone machines to report to 250 different internet addresses each day. Without the service, admins would have to manually block 1,750 domains each week, or 91,250 each year.
Wouldn't blocking "this weeks" known IP addresses stop the addition of new ones, rendering the infection impotent?
Enlightenment? It's just a flush in the pan.
Boy, talk about not understanding Internet protocols.
NTP packets are basically "I think it's this time...what do you think", while DNS is "I want to know the IP for www.childpr0n.com".
There just isn't any possible privacy issue with NTP packets, while DNS is basically a record of everything you visit. Heck, if OpenDNS were to modify the TTL in their DNS replies, they could even get more complete data about how often you request each site.
Actually, I must be wrong about you misunderstanding. Nobody could be that dumb, so you must work for OpenDNS (or another company that benefits from their data collection).
Not really, no.
For the NTP pool you send and recieve time data; funnily enough the time is public information.
Switching your DNS servers to OpenDNS means you end up sending them every domain you visit, and apparently every Google search too.
Most people would probably want their search terms and domains they visit to stay private, so your analogy between the NTP pool and commercial DNS providers breaks down here.
(note: I'm not implying sending your DNS data to OpenDNS means it's made public!)
You consider bar of soap to be worthless?
*sniff* Hmm... no wonder your hygene is questionable.
In the same manner that you give another entity access to all your NTP syncs.
OpenDNS is basically the same thing as the NTP pool.
Put the tinfoil down, and back away slowly...
I'm really not sure why people keep comparing OpenDNS to NTP. NTP shares the current time, in UTC. This information is not secret and is not a privacy violation because it was already available to anyone who wants it. If knowing your system time helps an attacker to i.e. guess your TCP sequence numbers, that is a weakness in your (pseudo)random number generator, not a weakness in running an NTP daemon.
Compare that to the data that OpenDNS can collect. They can see every hostname you resolve with their service. Not unlike application-level techniques used by various advertisers (web bugs, third-party cookies, redirections, HTTP "ping", etc.) to track your browsing, a list of every hostname you resolve can certainly compromise your privacy. Every site I visit, when I visited it, and an idea of how often I visited it is not "already available to anyone who wants it." Normally, to obtain this sort of information, an attacker would need to either break into this computer and install a program to log and transmit it, or they would need to conduct a man-in-the-middle type of attack against my ISP's network. There's a reason for that.
Why would I volunteer this data to a third-party who otherwise would have no access to it? What's my incentive to unnecessarily trust them in exchange for a service I don't need? It's not like there is anything difficult about running my own caching DNS server (and you can bet I don't use BIND), not to mention that DNS has to be one of the worst ways to deal with the problem of host security. It's just not a tool that was ever designed for this type of job; meanwhile, better tools that are designed for this job are readily and freely available. This might tempt someone who doesn't want to take responsibility for their own security and thinks anyone else should handle it for them, but I recognize that as a personal shortcoming, a flawed idea. The product of a flawed idea is also flawed, so with this arrangement you are merely trading one threat (the Conflicker worm) for another threat (reduced privacy). I can't call that a solution with a straight face.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Use 127.0.0.3, and put that in your /etc/hosts as 'dns.localdomain'. This still reaches your loopback address, but avoids some of the potential reverse DNS confusions with 'localhost.localdomain'.
It could be worse. Does anyone else here remember the 'Site Finder' chaos, when Verisign returned their own sales website domain for all nonexistent .com addresses? As the managers of .com, their behavior screwed up network monitoring tools worldwide, and misdirected huge amounts of misaddressed email to their servers, without warning. Patches were quickly released for every major DNS software package to block it, which is probably the real reason it got dropped: having every DNS server in the world used to the idea that 'I can block the behavior of idiots' is very, very bad for companies like Verisign that have repeatedly misused their position of trust against third parties.
They make money by monitoring your habits. Can any one tell me how they pay their CDN and caching servers bills for millions and millions queries everyday?
From the site:
"OpenDNS partners with hardware and service providers to deliver our award-winning security, infrastructure and navigation services."
They sale your private info.
There's nothing private about my public IP address. If they can manage to glean personal info from my IP address then, damn, they're good.
OpenDNS redirects all your Google search queries though their servers.
From the site:
"Is OpenDNS running a proxy?
Yes. Some software, including your (and our) beloved Google Toolbar, intercepts requests made via the address bar so that DNS requests never occur. This creates some usability issues, including making shortcuts - which require DNS requests to be made from the address bar - unreliable. We've designed a simple proxy that ensures the best of Google and OpenDNS work without causing problems.
When enabled, we route certain requests to a simple proxy which checks for the origin of the request. Shortcut-related traffic gets handled (and redirected) while all other traffic goes to the intended destination untouched. We are not storing or mining any of the data that passes through the proxy. The proxy does nothing malicious - it's designed to make your shortcuts work seamlessly with the Google Toolbar and similar services, giving you the best of both worlds.
Like all OpenDNS services, the proxy is respectful of your privacy. We do not track any of the searches made through the proxy. In fact, since so many people use Google we automatically rotate and delete the logs frequently. We do not store any of those logs, nor do we perform any non-operational-related analysis of the traffic sent through the proxy at any time. Protecting your privacy and delivering a fantastic navigational experience will always be two of our main goals at OpenDNS. We believe that this solution provides just that, and continues our tradition of innovative services that make your Internet experience with OpenDNS faster, safer and more reliable.
Ultimately, this proxy serves to enhance the OpenDNS experience and we recommend you leave it enabled.
They redirect web browser users or scripts accessing nonexistent domains to a page containing sponsored search results, ads, and a search form. The DNS protocol requires that a query for a nonexistent domain must return the "NXDOMAIN" error response.
You mean if I try to navigate to a nonexistent domain that OpenDNS will A) Inform me of my error B) Present me with a search form and C) Display a few innocuous text ads on the page?
I'm crushed. Damn, how could they?
How is that any worse than Google displaying text ads on their search results page? How hard can it be to block those text ads if they really get your panties in that big of a twist? If it bothers you that much, it's not like anyone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use their service.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
What you're showing is that the troll succeeded in making you rage. He'll now be more motivated to post it over and over, because he knows it works.
I think trying to explain this to people is a lot like back when AOL tried so hard to tell customers that their staff will never ask for their account password. Despite repeated warnings and prompts, the password phishers never seemed to have any problems. Those hardheaded users preferred the convenience of refusing to stop and think or to change their habits because both of those require a small amount of effort.
Likewise, people who feed trolls prefer their little emotional outbursts and the righteous feelings they get from them and are not interested in whether they are part of the problem. The idea that they are doing exactly what the troll wanted them to do does not get their attention. They may claim otherwise or feel inclined to argue with me about that, but this is very simple: when a person's words tell me one thing and their actions tell me another, I disregard their words every time. They don't really give me a choice in the matter.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Guess what browsers and web-proxies have done for, umm, 10 years? Mine says "Name Error: The domain name does not exist". What could OpenDNS possibly add to this simple message, other than their spam?
Better approach to what?
Why not just use your ISPs nameserver?
But they are breaking the standard. In particular rfc2308,
under 8:
Note the absence of statements like "lookup failures should silently map to A records that point to webservers serving spam".
Well, I can't vouch for the GP, but my ISP has a very flaky DNS service. For some reason, every 3 out of 10 queries for a given DNS returns a NX - or (in layman's terms), every 3 (at least) out 10 times I try to access a website (that is, one specific website, 10 times), Firefox says the domain doesn't exist. After the first 3 errors the domain is found and cached, and all is well, but this annoyed me to no end.
There were some days when it was bad, and others days the problem never showed up. After trying to diagnose the problem on my end, I finally concluded the problem were my ISP's servers, so I gave up and switched to OpenDNS. Never had the problem again.
So, you are equating all ads with spam?
If I use my ISP's nameservers,I get slower responses plus error pages from the ISP with ads on them.
The notion that OpenDNS is evil because they run ads is juvenile. So is the notion that they're evil because they keep logs and records. Name me a Unix system or any provider of any kind of Internet services that doesn't keep logs and records.
The phone company knows who you call. What are you doing about that great evil?
It seems you want me to be indifferent about the possibility that endless anonymous admins might get curious about my net behavior, but I'm supposed to be paranoid about OpenDNS?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm the founder of OpenDNS. I've decided to reply even though these comments are heinously wrong, and probably just me feeding the trolls...
We have never sold user data, ever. We also have no CDN bills, we don't even use a CDN. We've built a global BGP-speaking network with hundreds of peers around the world. I know, because I built it. We peer at LoNAP, LINX, PAIX, SeattleIX and on a few of the Equinix peering fabrics around the US.
The idea that we would build our business based on monitoring user data is preposterous. I wouldn't stand for it, nor would our employees. I'm confident that all our engineers are just as vocal or more vocal about doing the right thing than you are. We make it very clear how we make money, and it's all over our website. Go to http://guide.opendns.com and do a search. The sponsored results are ads where we get paid, the organic results are regular search results. That's how we make money. We might offer an enterprise for-pay service down the road as some of our customers begin to demand tighter integration with their network but for now, we're happy with our business. And I'm happy to report that we're profitable and stable, even in this economy.
And as to the OpenDNS proxy. It's true, we do redirect certain Google requests through a proxy so that we can make our OpenDNS shortcuts and some other features work more reliably. Two important things here: First, we peer with Google at every datacenter, so we aren't adding to your latency or anything else. Second, we don't log and store any data and we certainly don't care about it. We prefer to be able to confidently say we aren't keeping data on it. Of course, you are welcome to disable it by going into your settings and disabling the OpenDNS proxy. That's it. Do that and we don't ever see the request. Pretty easy. End of story.
David Ulevitch
Founder, OpenDNS
# Hack the planet, it's important.
This guy has a 2-digit UID, how could he possibly not be on the level? ;-)
Seriously, I've been using OpenDNS for a year or so, and based on what I know and everything I've read here minus David Ulevitch's description I don't really see a problem, just a lot of people overreacting. After reading what he had to say, I am confident that my gut feeling was accurate... unless of course he's lying, which I have no reason to believe.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.