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Dot-com da-bomb Verisign fires off an OpenDNS rival

Domain biz offers 'DNS Firewall'

Operator of the dot-com registry Verisign has launched a rival to popular online security service OpenDNS, called DNS Firewall.

Announcing the service in a blog post, Verisign's Michael Kaczmarek said that protecting a company from cyberattacks was "becoming increasingly difficult and expensive," and pointed out that hackers are increasingly getting around the traditional network firewall by targeting users.

Verisign's new DNS Firewall is cloud-based, and offers "robust protection from unwanted content, malware and advanced persistent threats." It claims the system is easy to configure and will work out significantly cheaper than traditional (hardware) network protection.

The service will identify global and local threats as was identify potential botnets and provide editable content filters. It is designed to protect businesses from a range of online threats from malware to phishing and even targeted attacks.

Implementing it requires you to sign up to the service – no word yet on pricing – and then simply change your DNS settings to run its through Verisign.

The service has an existing rival in OpenDNS – a very similar recursive DNS service that Cisco will acquire by the first quarter of next year. OpenDNS has grown dramatically in recent years, and claims it has 2,000 paying customers alongside many more users of its free service. It charges $28 per user per year for its most basic package; more advanced packages are negotiated on a per-customer basis.

Verisign is likely to be targeting the large corporate market, using its long history as a core DNS provider (it not only runs dot-com, the largest registry in the world by some distance, but also operates the internet's 'A' root.)

We spoke to OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch about his new rival, and he was surprised it hadn't happened sooner.

"Adding security to one of the most important control points on the Internet, the DNS, is important, and I am happy to see focus here from Verisign," he told us. "I'm surprised it took them this long to recognize the critical nature of DNS for enterprise customers."

He added cheekily: "I look forward to next year when I hope they will catch up to our 2011 feature set."

According to Verisign's Kaczmarek, citing McAfee, there was a 75 per cent increase in new malware in 2014. He also notes that the average data breach will cost a large organization $3.8m. ®

The first edition of this article compared DNS Firewall to Cloudflare, a related but different DNS service. DNS Firewall and OpenDNS offer recursive DNS services whereas Cloudflare offers an authoritative DNS service.

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