Does your ISP hijack DNS error pages?

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Does your ISP hijack DNS error pages? What ISP do you use?

By hijacking DNS error pages I am referring to redirecting users to a landing page full of advertisements when they make a mistake typing the name of a web site into their web browser.

As a DNS admin I'm curious to know how many other ISP's are doing this.

There was also a report earlier this year of one such service being compromised.

The vulnerability was a dream scenario for phishers and cyber attackers looking for convincing platforms to distribute fake websites or malicious code.

The hole was quickly and quietly patched Friday after IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky reported the issue to Earthlink and its technology partner, a British ad company called Barefruit. Earthlink users, and some Comcast subscribers, were at risk.
Please let us know if your ISP hijacks / redirects results when you type a name incorrectly.
 

Blake

Valued Member
I would never use your ISP's Dns servers. They are always slow and most times go down. I am a firm believer in Opendns. They have a custom error page when you go to a link that is not there, but they are always fast and highly improve your browsing experience. Though I have AT&T, and they have never had any dns pages.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
In my configuration I have around 20 DNS Resolvers broken up into 5 groups. Most of the groups are redundant within themselves using a mechanism called "anycast". In a nutshell, all of the DNS Resolvers speak the routing protocol of the network and share all of the IP addresses on them that we give out to clients. If one of the servers goes down then it falls off the network and the traffic fails over to the next closest healthy available server in the network. So for example, you might have 1.2.3.4 given to you by me the ISP to use as your DNS resolver setting, but that IP actually lives on several physical DNS resolvers. If the one you are using goes down you fail over (it takes about 30 seconds in my configuration) to the next closest server in the network and don't really notice that a server went down and you are now using a different server. Anyway, I guess the point that I wanted to make is that although ISP DNS Resolvers have a bad reputation, not all ISP's have overloaded DNS Resolvers that are always in danger of exploding.
 

Big Dan

EQ Forum Moderator
My ISP, Road Runner does at least in my region (HVC). I've seen a couple of RR connections that got the standard 404 pages rather than an ISP based ad page.

Like Blake, I use OpenDNS anyhow so it doesn't affect me.
 

Dude111

New Email
I have heard if you use a provider that does this and you dont want it to all you have to do is use DIFFERENT DNS SERVERS and it wont happen.... (I guess it depends on how they are redirecting things)
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Yes, most likely they have a set of servers you can use that do not have these features enabled, have a way to opt-out, or you can switch to public DNS resolvers such as OpenDNS or Google DNS.
 
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