Umbrella by OpenDNS: Where Big Data and Security walk together

by Marcos Ortiz

Like I said in a post before, Crime As A Service grows everyday exponentially in every country of this world, and everyday new kind of attacks, new kind of ways to steal information come to the light.

There is an amazing battle between organizations, companies and hackers around the globe; and of course, to win this war, you have to choose wisely your tools. I blogged about Splunk Security; today it’s the turn for another big player in this field: Umbrella by OpenDNS.

But, What is OpenDNS? In simple terms: “It’s the most advanced Internet Security Network in the World”, behind a key service for Internet: Domain Name System (DNS).

This great team have built an amazing DNS service for every user in the Earth planet, from small companies, single users to big organizations, everybody can take advantage of the tools that they are building.

The company was founded by David Ulevitch (@davidu), one of the most promising CEOs in America today, but their management team is very, very strong, since Dan Hubbard, the current Chief Technology Officer until their new Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Samuels. Ok, let’s go for the good stuff..

What is Umbrella

It’s a highly scalable Cloud-based service for protect end users from botnets, malware, phishing and all this kind of attacks. But the features doesn’t here, because Umbrella has a remarkable Security Graph where they analyze a lot of attacks and threats around its global network, and then, use all this for threats prediction. The numbers are insane:

Using Big Data and data mining methods to predict attacks before they happen, Umbrella Security Labs built the Umbrella Security Graph. The tool allows us to block sites that are going to host malware, bot networks, and phishing before they actually become malicious. The data is sourced from the 40+ billion DNS requests OpenDNS receives each day from 50 million customers in more than 150 countries.

And How do you think that they are doing all this today? Using a lot of Big Data tools like Apache Hadoop, Storm, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, RIAK and many more. To see all this in action, you can see the great webcast offered for the team in this video:

Umbrella’s High Class Research

You should know that I love research, so, this is a great thing to see how a company is changing an industry driven by its research in a hard core fields like Internet Security, Data Mining, Cryptography and many more cool things, that combined forms an incredible place to work. All this is directed from Umbrella Labs, where a high class team of researchers spend their days thinking how to improve life for every Internet user in the world. This is a very strong goal for them, for that reason, I strongly believe on their job. If you want to read some of the most great things about their research, just read these posts:

Umbrella’s flavors

The smart OpenDNS’s management team have built this product thinking in every Internet user, so, they have pricing plans for everyone, divided in four plans: Mobility, Enterprise, Insights and Everywhere.

Conclusions

It’s easy to know more about this great combination of Big Data and Security research; just read here. I just want to tell you, my dear Data-Driven friend, they are looking for highly capable guys like to maintain this huge network, and create some powerful algorithms on top of its incredible global Data Centers network. Good positions?