Raising the Bar on Threat Protection: OpenDNS Acquires BGPmon

The Internet is no longer the small interconnected academic experiment it once was. Today it is a massive, global interconnection of more than 50,000 networks and over two billion people. Most of those users just want to learn, connect, communicate and use the Internet as a grand accelerator for knowledge and business. But today we also have bad actors who use the Internet to steal money and wreak havoc. And yet, we still use the same protocols that were designed when the Internet was a friendlier place and security concerns weren’t a top priority. DNS and BGP are two of these fundamental protocols. They both help people get where they want to go on the Internet, but today bad actors abuse them for nefarious purposes.
So as a security company that has pioneered and become the leader of using DNS as a strong vector for raising the bar for threat protection, it should come as no surprise that we’ve expanded our horizons to now include BGP with the acquisition of industry leader BGPMon.
What’s BGP?
BGP is the protocol that routes traffic across the Internet. For network administrators at large companies that connect to two or more ISPs, as well as to ISPs who connect to other network providers, it’s a key part of their infrastructure. If BGP is hijacked and configured incorrectly, it can cause massive availability and security problems.
Why BGPmon?
When it comes to security, IT people are living a new normal. Companies are battling bad actors every day. Attacks are getting more sophisticated. Even worse, they’re harming the credibility of businesses. More troubling, hackers now are targeting places on the Internet no one expects. BGP is one of those areas. We’ve seen many examples like this massive bitcoin heist that demonstrate how bad actors are abusing BGP to hijack or re-route traffic. Or even really sophisticated spammers.
OpenDNS and BGPmon together bring broader visibility into what’s happening on a corporate network and cloud-delivered security that can discover and catch very sophisticated attacks. The number of attacks involving IP hijacking is either getting bigger (or thanks to BGPMon, people are now starting to notice) and BGP network monitoring and alerting is a powerful enhancement to OpenDNS’s network security.
BGPmon has built a solid reputation for providing network and routing monitoring services that help companies gain a better understanding of their internet infrastructure and potential security issues brewing from misrouted traffic. OpenDNS can speak from firsthand experience on BGPmon’s value. Part of our business is to monitor the world’s largest security network and look for threats on the Internet. BGPmon increasingly has become one of the data sources we rely on to do this task effectively. And we aren’t the only company that recognizes its value. BGPmon is monitoring corporate networks for thousands of customers including some of the most well-known category leaders all over the world: Internet service providers, financial institutions, technology companies, government organizations and popular consumer web services.
Moving forward, our integration plan for BGPmon is straightforward. We’ll invest in building out the service and making it more complete—but we also are committed to keeping the free features free. We’ll continue to use BGPmon data and innovate to augment our predictive intelligence and provide better threat protection to OpenDNS customers. So basically status quo for current customers.
While security threats are only going to get more sophisticated, having access to a broader set of technologies and tools that can provide a more holistic view of internet traffic is quickly becoming mission critical—especially for companies with hundreds of thousands of branch offices and globally distributed networks. Integrating BGPmon with OpenDNS means broader network visibility, enhanced predictive threat intelligence, advanced security services and an easy-to-deploy cloud-delivery model. And that’s what we call ‘winning’ in network security.