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Study Reveals How ISPs Responded to SiteFinder
penciling_in writes "During the 2+ weeks for which Site Finder was operational, a number of ISPs took steps to disable the service. A study just released reveals the details and analysis, including specific networks disabling Site Finder during its operational period. For example, the study reports China blocked the traffic at its backbone, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Korea's DACOM also disabled the service. US ISPs have been slower to act, but US ISP Adelphia disabled the service September 20-22 before re-enabling it on September 23." That link is a summary; or cut straight to the study itself.
I wonder how many other small-network admins did... I guess they're harder to sample though.
Most major ISPs and institutions successfully blocked a "service" which only resulted in widespread disruption in the way the Internet works. It didn't necessarily stay blocked, as in the case of Adelphia, but it was blocked rather quickly. I like the graphs showing SiteFinder traffic; they're very easy to read and they show the drops quite clearly.
Looking through the study, I found something interesting: most of the blockages of SiteFinder were outside the U.S. Interesting.....
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I know the biggest Danish ISP (TDC) blocked it pretty quickly. TDC have >80% of all DSL connections in DK.
Why can't you believe that? Verisign is not a NPO, they're a company that exists to make money. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Sitefinder did not seem to redirect images. I was trying to debug an image server I set up and keep getting a 404 when trying to load a test image. After spending about an hour looking at httpd.conf, I realized that I had mistyped the url. The 404s were coming from sitefinder. My server was set up correctly from the very start.
This is a company that isn't exactly the most liked in Norway, but I was very pleased with their handling of the problem and the responses.
And it shows that most admins are not willing to tolerate absurd changes like this.
> I don't get the big deal with this.
Well, when people code DNS clients and librarys, they generally do so by following the RFC.
The RFC states that when a domain does not exist, the name server returns the code NXDOMAIN.
So, logically, if you get a NXDOMAIN code back, the domain does not exist.
Verisign changed this RFC defined rule, and every single DNS using application is now broken, as they assume the information in the RFC spec is correct, and it is not so any longer.
There are many different things that broke because of this, which as an end-user of the internet you probably wont notice much of.
People that run service on the internet however do need to know how such servers are suppost to act. Verisign changed the rules without so much as telling anyone.
RFC stands for request for comments. You submit one, and _request comments_
Only after that phase is the RFC out of draft and so people start concidering to use it. This is how a standard is born via RFC. Verisign did not submit a new RFC requeting a change to the original one.
It would be like a web server chaning the numerical error codes.
404 means page not found. 900 is not defined.
Sending a 900 code when page isnt found would break every existing client.
This is what verisign did for DNS
I don't work for an ISP but I do have about 1500 staff users, plus another 9-10 thousand K-12 students who use the network too. The day this happened, I added some IP-based blocks to our web proxies to deny all access to sitefinder, then made the deny info throw back something that essentially said "That domain does not exist. Check the spelling and try again". Then I filtered outgoing packets on the mail servers to prevent leakage there.
.com and .net, and my old deny page was no longer necessary.
When the first BIND patch with delegation-only rolled out, that went on our resolvers and the real problem went away. Now the spammers couldn't make up arbitrary crap in
Anyone in the organization who heard about the fuss and tried to play with sitefinder had a window of about 12 hours before the changes took effect. Since then, it's been walled off.
Chances are, the bigger the organization is, the slower they move on changes like this. There's just too much bureaucracy to go through before you can do something like replacing your resolvers with new code.
Copied from here
n dex.html?sl=060104
But there is(was) a solution, perhaps mail servers should check to see if the sender domain for a particular piece of email resolves to the Ip above.If it does, forward the email toVerisign, any of the email addresses on this page should do :
http://www.verisign.com/corporate/about/contact/i
If the email sender domain resolves to the bogus Verisign wildcard entry, then its only fair that the email gets forwarded back to them, as it?s obviously spam and it resolves to their address.
Just in case Verisign turns it back on, be ready.
I mean, what's the point of living...if you don't have a dick?
My company uses SmartFilter. One day, it started blocking access to Site Finder. The reason code it returned indicated that sitefinder.verisign.com had been classified as "Criminal Skills". That sure seems appropriate to me.
My personal solution was to add it to my junkbuster config, so it would never show, and never register as a hit on their web page.
They are a for profit corporation, but they are also responsible for managing the .com and .net domains and if they want to continue doing so they will have to consider all the implications that making decisions like this will have. I don't think that anyone will argue that there was a blatant disregard for the rest of the internet community. Is that who you want managing the root DNS server for the .com and .net domains?
Anyone notice that while the sitefinder service was up, typos were beginning to get into the browser history since they didn't error out? And the next time you wanted to goto the same site, autocomplete would pick up the typo instead.
*mumble*
I'm just glad that was the worst that happened to me before this "service" got blocked here. I feel for the grandparent.
I'm not arguing that they were wrong, I think it was an obvious misuse of their power. But I'm also not surprised.
.com and .net domains as possible, and push the envelope at every turn. Thankfully they're being met with some resistance.
When you have a company in that position... with the ability to easily use a position for an obvious gain, and with a grey area of what's right and wrong (grey to them, not to us.) I think that it's very likely they will try to get as much out of their investment into the
I'm sure trying this was seen as a measured risk for them, and now it's not paying off, much to their displeasure.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Instead of an unknown host error, you get a 302 + text/html redirect that leads to a 200 + text/html page.
.net). Either way, the errors were not at all intuitive.
This plays havoc with Web Services, that expect 200+text/xml on a successful response. The SOAP Stacks either died on the 302 error code (Apache Axis), or the HTML body (MS
Like I said, we're a really small ISP, but it appears we caught 281 typo's (excluding anything that was referred from Slashdot).
It's pretty amazing to look at the common sites that folks typo.