30 Sep 08 DNS Hijacking, ISP Packet Modification, Morals and Privacy

While looking at some data statistics for one of our racks, I noticed that the DNS service has become incredibly busy as of late. Now about 4 years ago when these particular name servers were set up, they were left with their default option to respond to DNS queries to anyone for anyone. It’s not really terrible but hardly ideal so I began changing some settings. I do notice though that we seem to now be providing name server access to the large majority of the world. Only recently did I read an article on DNS Hijacking that certain ISPs use to deliver pay per click ads to their subscribers when they do anything from first start their browser to each time they hit a DNS error.

Now personally I think it’s a pretty cheap thing to do, and it’s also quite frustrating to those users that have to suffer this ‘feature’. A number of ISPs use such methods to ‘improve’ the quality of your service and I think it’s all pretty bad. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with legitimate website ads in order to earn an author or site master some money – I’m going to put a few here sometime, however offensive advert popups or other nasty behavior are really not acceptable by anyones standards anymore.

(more…)

Tags: ads, adverts, DNS Hijacking, dns server, internet connection, ISP Packet Modification, Morals and Privacy, open source, sniffing http