Very recently I felt one of my virtual machines is infected by malware and I was thinking about restoring it to a clean snapshot but then I thought let’s find other ways to identify and block these types of attacks. There were few more issue I wanted to resolve on my network which includes blocking of advertisements on the pages I visit, blocking all malicious IOC over the network, etc, one of the game BattleField 4 which I play on PS4 wasn’t able to connect to online gaming due to blocking of DNS at ISP, etc.

I started doing my research where I found discovered “Pi-Hole”, Basically Pi-Hole is a network-wide Advertisement blocking solution (DNS Server) that can be installed on a virtual machine or on your own hardware e.g RaspberryPI 3 in my case.

Pi-Hole blocks over 100k Advertisements which are served on different domains which can reduce bandwidth utilization and network can be monitored for all the DNS queries. At the moment I have been using Pi-Hole for the last 3 weeks and its turning beneficial for me in the following ways.

1, It blocks almost all advertisements on any device connected to my home network.

2, I have added a custom list to block all *.no-ip.com, etc DDNS list as I believe most of them are used for malicious purposes.

3, Pi-Hole lets you choose from 4-5 different vendors to choose DNS from however I have gone one level up and choose to install DNS Crypt to go with my setup, the helped me playing Battlefield 4 online easily.

You can read about pi-hole from their website: https://pi-hole.net