Thousands of sites cut off by OpenDNS gaffe

Thousands of legitimate sites were flagged as malicious yesterday due to an unknown conflict between Google’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) and OpenDNS.

Users reported that access to Google’s CDN ajax.googleapis.com was blocked by OpenDNS, along with  sites that used Google's hosted jQuery JavaScript library which were labelled phishing pages.

The OpenDNS (Domain Name System) is an popular alternative service that includes phishing protection as part of its feature set.

OpenDNS support officer Daniel Gifford de-listed the affected domain hours after it was first flagged by users and referred the problem to its phishing team.

But forum posts indicated that some users had switched over to rival CDNs after their sites had fallen over.

Gifford said users may need to clear the cache and flush the resolver.

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