New Jersey's Cablevision Hijacks DNS Error Pages

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @12:58AM from the fine-line-between-service-and-serviced dept.

Selikoff writes "I just noticed Cablevision's Optimum Online service has begun hijacking DNS Error pages with, you guessed it, ad-supported results. Aside from hurting the underlying stability of the Internet, there have been instances where hackers have used such tools against customers. I know Road Runner customers have had to deal with this for a couple months now, although at least they have an outlet to turn it off." Update: 09/30 13:18 GMT by T : Note, as several readers have pointed out, this hijacking is of DNS errors rather than 404 errors as originally presented.

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Hostnames that start with www by tepples · 2008-09-30 02:57 · Score: 1, Troll

The problem is that there is no reason to assume that just because a machine is making a DNS query it intends opening a TCP connection to port 80 (or 443).
Even if the hostname starts with www ?