Phishing, of course, is a hacking strategy where a web site masquerades as a well-known authentic site in order to harvest user-IDs, passwords and other confidential information. Visitors to a phishing site may become the victims of identity theft. Any site falsely labeled as such suffers a severe blow to its reputation.
The DNS servers of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) normally provide the association of domain names, the names of computer hosts and URLs with the equivalent IP-address numbers used by networking equipment to create the Internet. Alternative DNS services like OpenDNS provide the same function and add on extra value by providing corrections of misspelled entries, protection against phishing sites and options for the filtering of content. The landing pages used by alternative DNS providers to list other options for user-submitted entries that do not equate to anything on the Internet often contain ads that create income for the alternative DNS provider. Paid subscribers to the alternative DNS services get these landing pages with no ads.
Due to a conflict perceived as a phishing characteristic by OpenDNS for the SSL certificate used by the googleapis.com site, anyone trying to access a site that used the Google-hosted MooTools or JQuery tools would get either a "404 Page Not Found" error page or a page with a warning message that the site requested was blocked because it is a phishing site. These two particular tool sets operationally refer back to the googleapis site, making tool use across an array of web sites more efficient, a practice often used in web development. These mistaken phishing warnings continued for about three hours on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, mixed in with actual warnings for real phishing sites.
OpenDNS has not had this problem before; in fact, the company was lauded in December for its release of DNSCrypt, a product that improves privacy and security for browser users at Wi-Fi hotspots. OpenDNS quickly resolved the problem by de-listing on its servers the googleapis domain as a possible phishing source. Users were also instructed by OpenDNS to clear the cache on their browser and to flush the resolver function.
Kimberly Dovander
Kimberly is the pro blogger in the WHS family. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr... It doesn't matter - she knows them all. Send her a question, or a drop a line in the comment section below, and she'll get back to you.
-
2012-02-22
One of the fears of those who opposed the passage of the SOPA/PIPA Internet anti-piracy legislation in the US Congress last month may have come true. Many in the web hosting industry are concerned over the growi...
-
2012-02-16
The importance of keeping customers in the loop and making them feel an integral part of a web hosting provider's business was driven home by the recent hack attack on the Cryptome.org web site. Covering whistle...
-
2012-02-15
Yahoo has recently taken a step for interaction with the customer that all web hosting providers may want to think about emulating. Last week, the beta of Yahoo Small Business premiered to the public as a resour...
-
2012-02-09
The Internet Society recently set a date, June 6, 2012, as World IPv6 Launch Day, when it is expected that web companies and major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will permanently enable the IPv6 protocol for ...
-
2012-02-07
Last month, the United States Congress stopped consideration of two bills, the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the US Senate and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the US House of Representatives,...
-
2012-01-31
Other web host providers may take a lesson from the recent set of problems that have been the experience of DreamHost, a domain name registrar and web hosting provider founded in 1996 and based in Los Angeles, C...
-
2012-01-31
With the overwhelming reaction against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a few members of the United States Congress have put forth an alternative bill. Oregon Democrat Senator Ron...
-
2012-01-30
At its simplest, Magento is a robust e-commerce solution built on a foundation of open-source technologies. The blended approach that Magento uses provides the best of both worlds for end-users. On one hand, the...
-
2012-01-24
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced last week that the application system for the new gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains) of the Internet began on January 19th and is proceedi...
-
2012-01-19
Amid Internet site blackouts and public outcries, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been placed on hold in the Senate while sponsors regroup and reconsider their position on this controversial topic. Along w...
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
