I look forward to hearing your results from blocking port 53. What
communication have you done for this so far?



Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
402.363.5603
*[email protected] <[email protected]>*

The mission of York College is to transform lives through
Christ-centered education and to equip students for lifelong service to
God, family, and society

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Randy Mahurin <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Here are the comments from our Security Engineer, we've been using it for
> several months now:
>
> "So we've been using OpenDNS Umbrella for about 2 months now.  We
> actually replaced our proxy server with this after some back and forth on
> what it gained us vs what we lost.  While we've been using it for 2 months,
> we only recently implemented the Virtual Appliances (VA's- talked about
> towards the end of this) into the mix that really gave us more visibility.
>
> Long story real short, we've been happy with it so far and if you want any
> more info let me know.
>
> Pro's:
>
>    - We use bitsighttech.com as a 3rd party to rate us against other
>    .edu's.  We were sitting in the 600 range for quite awhile, and then in
>    july-sept, we just started getting hammered on score because of potentially
>    exploited machines.  We can track it back to pretty much the day we
>    switched over to openDNS to a lot of those falling off the list.  Systems
>    still weren't cleaned at the time, but it since they were no longer able to
>    go outbound, the score hit went away and then we were able to start using
>    umbrella to track them down.
>    - Blocks a ton of stuff that our proxy server wasn't blocking before
>    since now it is blocking more than just 80/8080 traffic!
>    - Scheduled reports.  I get a daily last 24 hr botnet report to show
>    me systems on campus that are blocked trying to access botnet systems,
>    we're just starting to work through this list.
>
>
> Con's:
>
>    - They don't auto rescan their sites, if something is blocked for
>    malware, until someone out there using their fabric requests a site be
>    rescanned, it doesn't happen. The first week we had 3 requests, the 2nd 3,
>    the third 2, etc...  We're probably averaging 1-2 support tickets a week on
>    sight rescans and 80-90% have come back clean and been removed. A few have
>    come back as still infected and we didn't unblock them.
>    - Blocking sites, for us we used to use the proxy server to block
>    exact pages out of phishes, so http:\\somesite.com\somefolder\phishme.html;
>    Well now the best we can do is blocking somesite.com.  Looking back at
>    99% of the phishes we've blocked in the past 3 years blocking the full site
>    hasn't been an issue, but there was a site or two that this will/would have
>    caused issues with.
>
> Other pieces
>
>    - Depends on your point of view if this is a pro or a con.  The
>    virtual appliances (talked about below) auto patch if you have 2 of them
>    (which you'd want for redundancy).  If you have a strict change management
>    policy, you have no control over when these patch beyond giving it a time
>    window in the middle of the night and it does it automagically.  It does
>    one, waits for it to come back up and restablish contact and verify
>    functionality (somehow, bit magically) and then it will do the other.
>    We'll be going through this for the first time within the next month.  You
>    have to sign up to even get notices of this happening and it was basically
>    between 11/18 and 12/8 we'll be rolling this out.  So no control over
>    it outside of the time window you provide for it to look at doing this
>    daily.  One less thing you have to patch or schedule, but something you
>    have no control over also.
>    - Just purchased by Cisco, waiting to see what they do on cost going
>    forward.  Part of the reason we moved away from the proxies were because
>    cisco kept increasing the maint cost each year!
>
>
>
> If you want to make the most use out of it.
> 1.  Roll out their Virtual Appliances and these become your primary DNS
> servers on campus for all of your clients (servers and workstations).  They
> forward *.local and *.whateveryourdomain(s) are onto your other DNS
> servers.  If you don't do this, reporting is fairly worthless as all you
> get is your DNS servers IP addresses, so tracking down who may be infected
> is difficult depending on what type of logging you have locally.  These are
> VMs.
> 2.  Plan on changing your outbound firewall to blocking tcp/udp 53 from
> all systems except your Primary DNS servers and the VA's in #1 at some
> point in the future.  Basically make sure people aren't bypassing the extra
> security you've provided by going to google's DNS, their home ISP, etc.  We
> plan on making this change over Christmas break.
> 3.  If an AD shop, look at rolling out their VM that ties into AD and
> parses DC logs for login events.  If/when this is in place it will match
> the IPs found in #1 to who was logged onto the workstation at that time.
> We haven't decided when to roll this out, there are some potential
> gotchas/changes to our setup we'd need to do.  Primarily we don't like
> installing new services onto DC's, so we may instead install it on a stand
> alone system and then do log forwarding on to it.  Haven't looked deep into
> this one yet, need to get through #2 first!"
>
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 1:31 PM, Hanson, Mike <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> We use OpenDNS and like it very much. We do not use the Umbrella product
>> though.
>>
>> I pursued the purchase of OpenDNS 5 years ago to reduce our endpoint
>> malware infection rates. The subscription paid for itself in the first year
>> by reducing the amount of time lost by the help desk, IT staff, and
>> employees to infections.
>>
>> It is a easy to setup and mange.
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> Mike Hanson, CISSP
>> Network Security Manager
>> The College of St. Scholastica
>> Duluth, MN 55811
>> [email protected]
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 2:09 PM, Gregg Heimer <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> We are also investigating OpenDNS as a possible replacement for
>>> expensive URL filtering costs integrated into our firewall.  Would also
>>> love to hear feedback.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Gregg Heimer
>>>
>>> Sr. Network Engineer
>>>
>>> Montgomery County Community College
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:
>>> [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler
>>> *Sent:* Thursday, November 19, 2015 11:18 AM
>>> *To:* [email protected]
>>> *Subject:* [WIRELESS-LAN] OT - Anyone using OpenDNS Umbrella DNS
>>> security product?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bit off topic, but I’m in the process of evaluating OpenDNS’ Umbrella
>>> DNS security product and looking for others that may have it deployed. So
>>> far it seems like a good addition to end-point security, but the devil is
>>> in the details. If anyone on the list is using it, I’d sure appreciate
>>> comments/feedback.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Jeff
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Jeffrey D Sessler
>>>
>>> Director of Information Technology
>>>
>>> Scripps College
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE
>>> Constituent Group discussion list can be found at
>>> http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> Montgomery County Community College is proud to be designated as an
>>> Achieving the Dream Leader College for its commitment to student access and
>>> success.
>>> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE
>>> Constituent Group discussion list can be found at
>>> http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
>>>
>>>
>> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE
>> Constituent Group discussion list can be found at
>> http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Randy Mahurin
> Office of Information Technology
> Boise State University
> 1910 University Drive, Boise, ID, 83725-1249
> Phone: (208) 426-4003
> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE
> Constituent Group discussion list can be found at
> http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
>
>

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