With all the phishing and spam web sites today, is becoming very difficult to stay secure while surfing, not to mention that you have to install all kinds of filters to get a minimum protection. So what do we do?

We go on and install every possible app until we find one that will please us?  Makes you mad.

Why not install something on a network level and block the bad from there?

With OpenDNS you can do that right on your home network and they have a great tutorial for every available router.

When i first discovered OpenDNS, i used it to enhance my network for gaming. Their servers are apparently faster and so i used the IP’s provided and i was quite pleased about the performance.
I then started to use OpenDNS on all the machines till i realized that i can install it on the network and enhance the overall performance.

Aside the faster browsing, OpenDNS provides a content filter, which can be managed once you’ve created an account with them and installed their DNS servers – 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 - into your TPC/IP properties of your network as you can see below.

Here’s how you start using it: Start OpenDNS.

As soon as you’ve created your account, you will be taken to your dashboard which will look like this:

On your “Settings” you’ll be able to set the content filtering level. You can block any category that you don’t want such as phishing, gambling and so on.

Check, save and let OpenDNS take it from here and handle it for you. They will blacklist and whitelist for you, while you enjoy your surfing.

I focused a bit on the benefits and settings but there is a lot more in there and there is no catch to it. It’s all free.

If you are the “security freak” type and you think that this alone doesn’t do it for you, i can’t do much to convince you but i can add one more tool to it, a Firefox extension which was recommended to me by my good friend David and is call WOT – Web of Trust.

Web of Trust is a community where users get to vote which web site is safe for surfing, if it can be trusted, if it has a good reputation. After installing this extension, every web site you will encounter that has been marked by the WOT users will display a safety circle.
There too, you can create an account and be a part of the community to help improve the security on the world wide web.

Here’s an example of how a rated web site will look :

Well, that’s it for today. Now go get safe!