DNSFilter has been named Web Filtering and Control Solution of the Year in the tenth annual CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards. Here's a look at the technology behind the win.
The 2026 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards results are in, and DNSFilter has been named Web Filtering and Control Solution of the Year. This isn't the first time DNSFilter has won the category, and holding onto it a decade into the program says something about both the problem and the product built to solve it.
The problem is simple to state: Nearly everything a person does online starts with a DNS query, which makes DNS the earliest point at which to decide whether a connection should happen at all. Most web filtering inspects a page after the browser has already reached it, usually through a proxy or a browser extension. DNSFilter works earlier, with every query checked against policy before the connection is made, so a malicious domain never resolves. Nothing loads, nothing renders, and there is no payload to clean up afterward. It's the reason both the NSA and CISA treat protective DNS as a baseline control rather than an optional add-on.
However, accuracy matters as much as timing. Attackers register a domain, run it for a few hours, and abandon it before any threat feed catches up, which means a static blocklist is out of date the day it ships. DNSFilter's technology classifies domains daily by reading domain age, hosting reputation, structure, and behavior as queries come in. It then flags malicious infrastructure an average of 10 days ahead of traditional threat feeds, which covers domains that are minutes old, not months old.
"Attackers depend on DNS to connect people to the content they control, which makes it the most efficient place to break the chain. This award reflects what customers tell us every day: filtering has to be fast, accurate, and invisible, or it doesn't get used."
TK Keanini, CTO of DNSFilter
But control has to be practical, too. Security that needs a specialist to operate tends not to get operated, so the goal has always been granular control without an administrative tax. Blocking an application means every hostname that application touches. A policy written once holds everywhere, managed from a single console or automated through the API.
Practical control brings structure, but what happens when people leave the building? Protection has to follow the person rather than the network, across laptops, phones, tablets, and the assorted devices nobody thinks to count, at the office, at home, or on public Wi-Fi. No hardware, no proxy rerouting, no VPN backhaul, and no gap between joining an unmanaged network and being covered on it. Shadow AI tracking also becomes essential at this layer—to provide not only visibility but control.
Being covered is the floor. Teams also need to see why a block happened, not just that it happened, with a full chronological picture of what a device was doing at the time. That's where DNSFilter's behavior analytics comes in, including advancing Shadow AI and agentic feature sets. And it's the difference between an investigation that eats an afternoon and one that takes ten minutes, whether the job belongs to a two-person IT team or an MSP holding hundreds of client policies at once.
None of these add-ons or features get built in a vacuum. Many of them started as a feature request, a support ticket, or a "have you thought about" email from an MSP running hundreds of client environments. That pushback shapes the roadmap, and the 57,000+ organizations that route their DNS through DNSFilter every day keep shaping it.
An award is a snapshot, and the problem it recognizes doesn't hold still. DNS sits in front of almost everything an organization does, and there is a great deal more to do with that vantage point than blocking bad domains. That's the work we keep on pursuing and what is coming next.
More than 57,000 customers worldwide rely on DNSFilter, from global enterprises and mid-market companies to educational institutions, government agencies, MSPs and MSSPs. DNSFilter reaches them directly and through a global partner ecosystem that includes CrowdStrike, Amazon, GuidePoint Security, Climb, SHI, Pax8, N-able and Midis Group.
Curious what the award is actually about? Start a free trial, point a network at DNSFilter, and see how much never reaches your users!