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In This Issue
- Best Practices for Security During the Holiday Season
- Get involved in the OpenDNS community — It's Fun!
- Meet an OpenDNSer: Vinny LaRiza
- Take a Tour of the OpenDNS Offices in San Francisco
- Customer Spotlight: Amoeba Records
Best Practices for Security During the Holiday Season
We love this time of year. It's all gift-giving and holiday celebration from here. But along with the gift-giving and celebration comes an increased amount of time spent online, making purchases that require disclosure of personal information like credit card numbers. Unfortunately phishing scams and identity theft generally spike in November and December, with criminals capitalizing on the holiday season.
That's the bad news. The good news? You're using OpenDNS, which means you've taken the single most important step to protect you and everyone on your network. Double check to ensure you're blocking the following categories in the Security section of your OpenDNS account:
- Phishing: Take the guesswork out of identifying fraudulent links, and enable this feature to block them automatically.
- Malware/Botnet Protection: We provide this protection to render certain large-scale botnets and malware useless and keep your computer and network secure.
Get Involved in the OpenDNS Community — It's Fun!
OpenDNS offers lots of ways to get involved and contribute. The more people who use OpenDNS, and the more people who get involved by submitting websites, suggesting new features and voting, the better the service is for our 20 million plus users around the world.
Here are two ways you can get involved today:
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Submit a website to PhishTank, the Internet's largest clearinghouse of phishing data.
PhishTank.com is the place to submit websites you happen across that you suspect to be fraudulent. Receive an email claiming to be from PayPal and urging you to update your account information, but it seems suspicious to you? Submit the site to PhishTank and allow the community of academics, researchers and network operators to vote and determine its legitimacy. Once the site is verified as a phish, it's blocked for all OpenDNS users. That's something you can feel good about!
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Suggest a new feature at IdeaBank.
Great ideas come from everywhere. And since we have so many smart users, the best ones sometimes come from you. Take a minute and suggest that idea that occurs to you every time you log into your OpenDNS account. Is it a new content category that would make your life easier, or a new feature altogether that you think lots of people could benefit from? Check out how many user-suggested ideas have already been put into action.
Meet an OpenDNSer: Vinny LaRiza
The OpenDNS team is a dynamic (and growing!) group of smart and savvy professionals. To help you get to know us, we're kicking off a new monthly feature where we introduce you to one special OpenDNSer. This first month, please allow us to introduce you to Vinny LaRiza, the man behind the OpenDNS Domain Tagging system.
Tell us a little bit about what you do at OpenDNS?
I am the Community Moderator, so the bulk of what I deal with is Domain Tagging related. I also handle all of the Phishtank related tickets.
Favorite part about working here?
Other than the fact that we share similar colors with the WORLD SERIES CHAMPION SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS!?!? Honestly though, I feel like we have the smartest, most personable and driven people on the planet working for this company, and we all care immensely about making OpenDNS as good as it can be. It makes waking up and coming to work every morning that much easier when you have that to look forward to. Waffle Wednesdays aren't bad either :)
If someone wants to start getting involved in the community, where's a good place for them to start?
I would suggest heading right on over to Domain Tagging and start voting on domains. If you get tired of that and are considering stepping it up a notch, you can apply to become an OpenDNS Moderator.
Favorite tech gadget?
My Alienware m15x lappy is pretty awesome. That beast has been handling everything I've thrown at it. It was a questionable purchase at the time that I bought it but now that I have it, I seriously love it.
And if you were going to have one super hero power, what would it be?
I think becoming Captain Money Growsontrees would be pretty neat, and being able to freeze time would definitely have it's advantages, but seriously, how can one pass up the power of flight? Gotta go with flight. Final answer.
Take a Tour of the OpenDNS Offices in San Francisco
As far as workplaces go, it doesn't get a whole lot better than OpenDNS headquarters. In the South of Market district of San Francisco, we're lucky to be just a stone's throw from the Giants ballpark, which comes in handy when we want to watch the Giants win the World Series! It's also a generally great space, with exposed ceiling beams, lots of room to stretch out and conference rooms named after TLDs, like .com, .net and .org.
Get to know OpenDNS a bit better and take this photo tour of OpenDNS headquarters, courtesy of BusinessInsider.com.
Customer Spotlight: Amoeba Music
| Amoeba Music is the world's largest independent record store and has locations in San Francisco, Berkeley and Hollywood, Calif. Amoeba "IT Guy" Channing Hansen chose to use OpenDNS for two primary reasons at the Amoeba Hollywood store. First, he was looking to add security features to their network. And second, he knew OpenDNS offered faster Internet, due to our DNS caching. "OpenDNS also plays nicely with our internal DNS server," Hansen said, and today has every client in the store on OpenDNS. Rock on. |  |
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