As people worldwide are using internet services, IoT devices, and cloud computing, the attack surface has increased. In addition, remote work is flourishing, and you don’t know how safe the network and devices of your employees and contractors are. Meanwhile, cyberattackers have become more advanced and are deploying innovative ways to infiltrate networks, systems, and data. Even technologies like firewalls and antivirus software fail before them. This is where DNS filtering services such as SafeDNS can help provide superior protection to all your networks, data, devices, and remote workforce. In this article, we will understand what DNS filtering is and its benefits. Let’s start!
What Is a DNS?
Domain Name System (DNS) is used to match a domain name such as Geekflare.com to an IP address. IP addresses are a long and unique string of numbers and characters that can identify a device in a network. This address such as 192.0.2.1, 2001:db8:0:1:1234:0:567:8:1, etc., can be complex to remember. DNS makes this simpler by corresponding a web domain name with its IP address so that users can easily access websites on the internet. Instead of memorizing complex IP addresses, it works like a phonebook or a smartphone’s contact list. You can store your contact phone numbers in your smartphone and call them with a tap instead of dialing each number manually. Once you type a site’s domain name in your web browser, your device will create a DNS query. It will send this query to a special web server known as DNS resolver to match the requested domain name to an IP address by checking the cache or querying other DNS servers. The DNS server now sends the correct IP address as a response to your device, known as “domain resolving”. Finally, your device can contact the server associated with the IP address. This will help initiate the connection, and the requested website’s content will load. This might sound lengthy, but all this process takes microseconds so you can access a site quickly.
What Is DNS Filtering?
DNS filtering refers to a process where DNS is used to block or restrict malicious sites and code to filter out inappropriate or harmful content. It helps secure your data, network, and assets from cyberattackers. In addition, DNS filtering allows better access controls in an organization and gives you more comprehensive visibility on who has access to what type of data. Today, you can find many software solutions with DNS filtering capabilities. They are known as DNS filtering services or solutions, such as SafeDNS.
How do DNS filtering services Work?
Every DNS query reaches a specially-configured DNS resolver acting as a filter. If it detects a suspicious domain, it refuses to resolve the query and blocks users from accessing the sites they have requested. To decide whether or not a user or domain name looks suspicious, DNS resolvers maintain a blocklist. If a domain is listed in this, the DNS resolver will block the site, and if it is not in the list, the domain name’s request will be approved to enable access to the site. Domain filtering services this capability, and they can also maintain an allowlist to permit only those domains listed in the allowlist while blocking all others. Enabling a DNS filtering service in your network will assess all the incoming and outgoing internet traffic, allowing only safe traffic to pass by. These services filter web traffic between the requested web page and the IP address making the request. It will filter the request based on some categories such as social media, news channels, phishing campaigns, malicious sites, inappropriate sites, etc. Next, it will block the ones looking suspicious or harmful. Example: Suppose you have deployed a DNS filtering solution in your organizational network. If any employee clicks on a harmful link received via mail, the request will first go to the DNS resolver using your DNS filtering service instead of going directly to the malicious site. The DNS resolve will block this request if it finds the malicious site on its blocklist, preventing the attack.
Why Do You Need DNS Filtering?
Individuals and businesses across the globe are facing cybersecurity attacks. By leveraging advanced technologies and network ransomware, intruders can launch malicious campaigns without human intervention. They attempt to breach your organization’s security to steal information, hack your accounts, threaten you for money, and whatnot. Hence, you must always be prepared to face cyberattacks, which can be of many types:
Malware: It may include spyware, worms, ransomware, viruses, trojans, etc. Malware can leverage a weakness to breach security perimeter such as clicking on a harmful link and downloading email attachments. Phishing attacks: They are common where attackers send a large number of malicious emails to users while disguising themselves as a reliable source. It can be spear-phishing to companies and individuals, whaling to stakeholders and employees, and pharming to any user. Man-in-the-middle attacks: It occurs when attackers intercept a transaction between two parties to manipulate or steal data. Denial-of-Service attacks: It occurs by flooding networks, systems, and servers with web traffic to overload bandwidth and resources. It paves the way to other cybersecurity attacks. SQL injections: It occurs by inserting malicious code in a system or server via SQL language to force the server to give up secured data. Zero-Day attacks: It’s exploiting a vulnerability when a network or system is newly announced and security patches are yet to release.
Other attacks can be password theft, cross-site scripting, rootkits, IoT attacks, and more. Therefore, if you want to safeguard yourself from these deadly cyber attacks, you must always be prepared with effective security tools to ward them off. And DNS filtering is a great way to go about it.
How SafeDNS Can Help?
Using a DNS filtering solution, such as SafeDNS, is beneficial for your business. It can protect your systems, data, and network from cyberattacks so that you can have a peaceful sleep. SafeDNS is a cloud-based web filtering solution to safeguard your business and family against cyberthreats and inappropriate content on the web. This web filtering has the exceptional quality to filter malicious sites and content with advanced technologies. Let’s look at its features to understand how it can help you.
Features of SafeDNS
Here are some of the features of SafeDNS, making it an innovative and valuable service to safeguard your network and assets.
AI-Powered Filtering Technology
SafeDNS leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for its categorization database for data analysis and processing, collected through its cloud web filtering service and web crawlers. This is an automatic, proprietary web categorization that is simple yet comprehensive and accurate. This helps save you time so that you don’t have to recategorize or fall prey to attacks. It can catch bots, process 1+ billion DNS requests per day, and categorize around 400,000 requests per day.
Parental Control
Nowadays, the internet is accessible to everyone, including children. They use the internet to study, play video games, and whatnot. At this time, you must ensure to protect them from accessing harmful content that they are not meant to access. To this, SafeDNS provides parental control and web filtering services to safeguard your children from accessing explicit, inappropriate, and gross content. It will provide you with peace of mind and assurance that your children are accessing safe content.
DNS-Layer Filtering
Web filtering at the DNS layer is a comprehensive internet filtering technique that can block unwanted websites before any user can access them. It blocks both HTTPS and HTTP sites to provide you with superior protection. DNS filtering is beneficial as 90% of malware utilizes DNS to deploy threats.
Category-Based Filtering
With SafeDNS, you can decide different content categories to allow or block. They have more than 60 categories to choose from so you can decide what you or your employees should access and what not to.
Filtering Quality Monitoring
Filtering quality is essential to ensure you are getting the maximum protection. SafeDNS’s team monitors and improves filtering quality daily. They regularly add new web sources that propagate malware and other harmful intent so that the filter can cover the maximum sites and give you top-notch protection.
Filtering Customization
You get intelligent customization options to make filtering easy and based on your preference. You can customize allowlists or blocklists, an ad blocker, time limits on web usage, and page blocking for each filtering policy.
Exceptional Quality
SafeDNS’s web filter is of high quality, proved several times by tests conducted by third parties. Its database is updated daily to cover more threats and improve detection capability. SafeDNS has been awarded five times for Parental Control Product from reviews and tests by a world-famous test lab – AV-Comparatives. It was also reviewed by Australian third parties, citing SafeDNS as one of the best DNS providers to block malicious threats and filter web content.
High Accuracy
SafeDNS offers high accuracy of web filtering to make sure it can detect all the threats and risks and provide you with a safe internet environment. As per tests conducted in 2020, SafeDNS blocks 98.5% of all adult content requests, which is a near-perfect score. SafeDNS showed zero false positives in tests for the past five years, saving you from overblocking issues.
Botnet and Malware Protection
SafeDNS offers a proactive cloud protection service that can efficiently block botnets, ransomware, phishing, crypto mining, and malware. It helps prevent cybercriminals from stealing data or converting your computers into zombie machines that they can control fully to increase botnets. It can also block dangerous sites and malware content even before the content gets uploaded into your system.
Excellent Content Filtering
SafeDNS can filter all inappropriate, unwanted, or harmful sites such as violence, pornography, racism, hate, alcohol, weapons, gambling, drugs, and other categories that can make the internet world an unsafe place. There are multiple categories you can choose from and block content types. Their database has information from 109+ million sites categorized into 61 groups, and this is constantly getting bigger with the efforts of SafeDNS. Furthermore, SafeDNS can block online advertisements as well in various forms, such as video ads, audio ads, context-based ads, pop-ups, banners, etc. It will help safeguard you from hackers leveraging ad networks to deploy malware payloads to infect computers.
Why Should You Choose SafeDNS?
Here are some of the benefits of using SafeDNS for businesses, homes, and organizations.
Zero-Cost Implementation
Since SafeDNS is cloud-based, you don’t have to purchase any extra software or hardware on the server or client computers. You just need to register with SafeDNS and set up this service. Next, you can specify your preferred filtering settings via its site interface and let SafeDNS do its work to create a safer web environment for you. To get the service, you only require a subscription to SafeDNS.
Faster and Reliable Internet
DNS availability is a major issue for most ISPs. But if you are with SafeDNS, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Their DNS servers can reach everywhere from the Americas and Europe to the Far East and Australia. Therefore, no matter where you are from, you can enjoy a faster and more reliable internet connection in any part of the earth. In addition, SafeDNS’s servers follow the BGP protocol that enables high-speed and redundant internet access.
Remote Work
Remote work continues to flourish, especially after the pandemic. More and more companies are embracing remote work, which enables their employees, contractors, and freelancers to work from any part of the world. However, they may use their devices and internet connections such as public wifi, which may not be safe. This can pose security risks for your organizational data. Hence, using SafeDNS will help you eliminate those risks. It will protect your data no matter where your employees are working from.
Safety from IoT-related Risks
The use of IoT devices is increasing worldwide, at homes, and in organizations. People use fitness wearables, smartwatches, voice assistants, etc., containing personal information. This creates more opportunities for cyber attackers to steal data and cause harm. Since these devices have fewer storage and processing capabilities, installing cybersecurity applications such as antivirus and firewalls is tough. But if you use DNS filters, you don’t have to worry about all that since you are filtering content and cyber attacks at the DNS layer.
Protection from Cloud-Related Risks
Businesses all over the world are moving to the cloud to make their work faster and easier with cost-efficiency and scalability. It is also beneficial for remote work. But nowhere is safe. Cloud-related risks are expanding. Misconfigured settings are major causes of security breaches, account hijacking, insecure interfaces, and unauthorized access. You can enable DNS filtering in the cloud irrespective of your location. So, it has become easier to protect your devices and data from cloud-related risks.
Compliance
Data privacy risks have multiplied over the years, with hackers and fraudsters stealing information for personal gains. This is why regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR have framed rules that every organization must abide by. Using DNS filtering services such as SafeDNS, you can protect your organizational and customer data from getting compromised. As a result, you are safe from compliance risks and penalties.
Employee Productivity
You can empower your employees, freelancers, and contractors by giving them the power of DNS filtering. It will keep their network and devices safe while keeping the data safe. Hence, they no longer have to worry about risks. It will enable them to make the most of their time during work efficiently.
Support
You may need assistance at any time while using a service. Sometimes there can be technical difficulties, or you are not able to understand something, and so on. And when it comes to security, a helping hand can prove highly viable in such scenarios. Everyone seeks good quality support from a service provider, and SafeDNS has it covered. It has a professional, knowledgeable, friendly team to support your issues and queries. You can reach out to them via phone calls, emails or generate a ticket to get your issues resolved. In addition, you can also read their instructions and blogs to understand how SafeDNS works. It will also resolve many of your minor confusions. You can try SafeDNS FREE for 15 days without any credit card.
Use Cases of DNS Filters
Partners and Telecoms
DNS filtering will protect your clients’ and partners’ security online with its customized solution. It will also help improve your security ROI and business outcomes.
Businesses
Businesses can protect their organizational network using web filtering solutions to protect from phishing, malware, and other risks. It will help increase employee productivity and enforce web usage policies throughout the network.
Homes
DNS filtering can protect your family from risks so that you can give a safe internet environment to your kids. They will only be supplied with safe content to help them learn and grow without any risks.
Software and Hardware Vendors
DNS filters like SafeDNS’s web categorization database can complement your products’ value and functionality. It will help group web searches based on the type of content.
Education and Libraries
Provide safer browsing experience to all the staff members and learners on-premises, such as universities, kindergartens, and high schools.
Non-Profits
Non-profit organizations can use SafeDNS to block offensive and harmful content in their networks. It will make your perimeter child-friendly while keeping attackers at bay.
Conclusion
You cannot stop cyber attackers, but you indeed can protect your data and systems by deploying safer security tools and technologies. DNS filtering solution such as SafeDNS is an excellent way of doing that. It will safeguard you from malware, phishing, cloud-related risks, IoT-related risks, and more, with cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability. This will make the internet safer for businesses, homes, and organizations.
