Tens of Millions Users Around the World Use Free Alternative to Commercial DNS Resolvers
Berkeley, CA – Just a little more than year after DNS security solution Quad9’s worldwide launch, the nonprofit reports that tens of millions of users are now blocking a minimum of 10 million malicious events a day. Overall, Quad9 reports queries to the service are up 6,200 percent from its production launch in November 2017, with steady growth around the world. In the last month, Quad9’s queries are up by more than 25 percent. In the United States, the number of queries is increasing by about 5 percent a week, while the growth has been more robust in Europe, where queries are up by 10 percent per week in recent months.
“It’s staggering when I look back over the past year and realize how much we have accomplished. Our growth has exceeded expectations. We’re fortunate to have the gift of timing on our side. Customers are hungry for solutions offering privacy and security,” said John Todd, Executive Director of Quad9. “While we compete with commercial DNS service providers that have vast resources to market their offering,” he says, “we have an advantage in that our lack of profit motivation allows us the freedom to truly put the security and the privacy of the customer in the forefront and precludes us from making the customer or their data the product. Right now our best advertisements are the experiences of the user community who are already benefitting from the added protections we provide. We’ve achieved our key goals of a measurable impact in reducing internet security risks, while simultaneously keeping user privacy as our top priority.”
In a little over a year of production operations, Quad9 is now operating service clusters in 137 cities spanning 82 counties, with more locations coming online every day. Quad9 is in use on every continent except one, Antarctica, where Todd says “we’re still trying.” Additionally, Quad9 aggregates threat intelligence feeds from 19 partners, including abuse.ch, Bambenek, IBM X-Force, Netlab, and ThreatSTOP. Quad9 provides services in cooperation with New York City’s NYC Secure program that provides cybersecurity tools to New York City residents and visitors.
“We’re tremendously proud to see the growth of Quad9 and the effective protection it offers,” said Philip Reitinger, President and CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) and Board Member of Quad9. “It was an ambitious project, and through it we’ve proven it is possible to collaborate and provide free world class security at scale.“ GCA spearheaded the sponsorship and development of Quad9 in collaboration with Packet Clearing House (PCH) and IBM.
Quad9’s goals for 2019 include expansion of sponsorship roles with both threat intelligence providers who can supply actionable data, as well as general funding partners who want to take concrete action to promote the general security and safety of the Internet and their user base.
“Our growth in 2018 tells me we are on the right trajectory,” Todd said. “We see millions of people engaging with us online or being referred through a friend or business associate and becoming enthusiastic Quad9 users. With expanded resources, we can improve security and privacy for an unlimited number of users worldwide especially those in cities at the edge.”
Because Quad9 does not gather specific data on users to protect their privacy, exact numbers on growth are based on estimates of figures including queries, blocking events, and locations of operation.
About Quad9
Quad9 is a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform that provides end users robust security protections, high-performance, and privacy. Quad9 is an independent nonprofit formed from a collaboration of IBM, PCH and GCA. Learn more at www.quad9.net.
December 20, 2018
