PiHole

To reduce advertisement annoyances and the attack surface in our browsers I've installed "pihole" for test purposes.

If you want to give it a try set

172.28.5.19

as your DNS resolver. This must be done manually - due to possible side effects it cannot get configured automatically by DHCP.

Please note that this is a local-only (RFC1918) address and can only be used locally inside our LAN.

Besides some blacklists it uses our normal DNS-Servers to resolve all legit names, so no functionality is lost.

While I can not demonstrate the effect of lowering the risk by loading less junk I can show what a difference this blacklist makes regarding advertisement. I have put some screenshots here:

• https://owncloud.gwdg.de/index.php/s/XvfxFhvu35H82Ak

The screenshots are taken with identical configured browsers on two machines at the exact same time but with/without pihole active.

Of course there are some problems with this approach:

• otherwise acceptable advertisement is blocked too
• some websites refrain to deliver content if ad-blocks are detected
• some websites do not work correctly if they can not load third party content

For _me_ the positive aspects overweight by far...

If you are unsure if you are actually using this nameserver you may test it with a simple query on a command line. An example on Windows:

P:\>nslookup lagrotta4u.de 172.28.5.19
Server:  pihole.ifi.loc
Address:  172.28.5.19

Name:    lagrotta4u.de
Address:  172.28.5.21

Problematic names do resolve to one of the two redundant piholes. See the corresponding screenshot for the effect inside a browser.

Currently this system blocks 611000 (!) hosts by cumulating these lists:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains
http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts
https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainblocklist
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt
https://hosts-file.net/exp.txt
https://hosts-file.net/emd.txt
https://hosts-file.net/psh.txt
https://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Airelle-hrsk.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Shalla-mal.txt
https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/downloads/RW_DOMBL.txt
https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/downloads/LY_C2_DOMBL.txt
https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/downloads/CW_C2_DOMBL.txt
https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/downloads/TC_C2_DOMBL.txt
https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/downloads/TL_C2_DOMBL.txt
http://www.networksec.org/grabbho/block.txt
https://isc.sans.edu/feeds/suspiciousdomains_Medium.txt
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_malvertising.txt
http://www.joewein.net/dl/bl/dom-bl.txt
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ZeroDot1/CoinBlockerLists/master/hosts
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker/master/data/hosts/win10/spy.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/static/SamsungSmart.txt
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Easyprivacy.txt
https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anudeepND/adac7982307fec6ee23605e281a57f1a/raw/5b8582b906a9497624c3f3187a49ebc23a9cf2fb/Test.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Easylist.txt
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt

Links

• https://pi-hole.net