DNS-based malware protection: Quad9

Many moons ago I was an enthusiastic user of OpenDNS (when it still was a standalone company), then between one move and the other I forgot to enable it again and found Google/Cloudflare to be equally capable and fast.


However I always missed the protection capabilities of OpenDNS, and today I spent some time looking for alternatives. That's how I came across Quad9: an open DNS recursive service for free security and high privacy.
Importantly: Quad9 is operated by a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit foundation with the purpose of improving the privacy and cybersecurity of Internet users. Quad9 is headquartered in Zürich and is subject to Swiss privacy law (Swiss government extends that protection of the law to Quad9's users throughout the world, regardless of citizenship or country of residence).

I enabled Quad9 on my home router and then proceeded to test it.

But first I had to find a malicious url, which funnily enough is harder than I thought :D

Quad9 does not support wicar, so I had to resort to URLhaus. There I found an older submission from the previous day, and then as expected it did not resolve, and was reported as blocked by Quad9 too: https://quad9.net/result?url=w.softprojectcode.com

Looks like I'm a bit safer now.

To do next: enable DNS over TLS

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