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Bell Starts Hijacking NX Domain Queries
inject_hotmail.com writes "Bell Canada started hijacking non-existent domains (in the same manner as Rogers), redirecting NX-response queries to themselves, of course. Before opting-out, you get their wonderfully self-promoting and self-serving search page. When you 'opt-out,' your browser receives a cookie (isn't that nice) that tells them that you don't want the search page. It will still use their broken DNS server's non-NX response, but it will show a 'Domain Not Found' mock-up page that they (I surmise) tailor to your browser-agent string. During the opt-out process, they claim to be interested in feedback, but provide no method on that page (or any other page within the 'domainnotfound.ca' site) to contact them with complaints. They note that opting-in is 'recommended' (!), and that 'In order for opt-out to work properly, you need to accept a "cookie" indicating that you have opted out of this service. If you use a program that removes cookies, you will have to repeat this opt-out process when the cookie is deleted. The cookie placed on your computer will contain the site name: "www.domainnotfound.ca."' Unfortunately most Bell Internet users won't understand the difference between their true NX domain response, and Bell's injected NX response."
Well, that's the bad old ma Bell that's still alive and kicking in Canada.
You wouldn't believe the amount of angry customer calls I had escalated to me by people who think that computers, modems and internet service are all the same things and I was responsible for all of them. If you want me to share them with you, bring lots of hard liquor - you're going to need it.
The Deutsche Telekom / T-Online does exactly the same in Germany.
Love over Gold.
Taco stands for Targetted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out. It is a firefox addon that keeps a generic, non-user specific cookie opting out of the things that need cookies to opt out of.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If this is a true description of the opt-out, it is SERIOUSLY broken.
Simply put, any opt-out mechanism MUST enable the user's computer to properly receive an NXDOMAIN response. Because the problem is NOT the advertising web page on a web browser typo for http, but all the other things that do DNS lookups.
For example, NXDOMAIN wildcarding even snagged and confused Dark Tangent into thinking that someone was trying to MitM the Defcon forums!
I can accept an ISP doing this only under the following conditions:
a) The opt-out is a one-click item on the page
b) The opt-out is perminent and for all connected through that IP/customer link
c) The opt-out is a real opt-out which will cause NXDOMAIN responses to be properly returned as NXDOMAIN.
This clearly fails B and C.
Test your net with Netalyzr
This should be handled at the infrastructure level. DNS doctoring is bad for many reason. I'm sure a firefox or IE addon would actually be much more preferable. Something easy to dis-activate when things break.
That's fine, but whether or not it's helpful for the typical Web surfer is completely irrelevant.
It's a clear example of a layering violation. If you want URL fixing, great, but do it in the browser, don't hijack DNS which other services depend on.
As far as I am concerned, it is really is clear cut that this shouldn't be happening!
These pages are helpful for the typical web surfer
How is that? By encouraging them to use a search engine with which they are unfamiliar, or by leading them away from their intended target with advertising. Look at the Sample Page again, and explain to me the utility in that crap. Domain errors should ideally result in a big red "X" so the user knows to turn around and try again.
In fact, an automatic URL "fixing" service would be one of those revolutionary Web 2.0 features that exists in the recesses of the web, part of the infrastructure and totally natural to use.
Now this is an interesting idea. Let me tell you the best way to handle this - on the client side, after the proper DNS opportunities have been exhausted. This is because the client best knows the users browsing proclivities (most often viewed pages, favorite search engines, etc).
Is there any way a local caching name server can detect this brokenness and return the right answer? I seem to remember some bind configs a few years back that would do that but I'm not sure if they would still work.
Or maybe a firefox plugin could detect this damage and restore the original, correct behavior somehow.
Isn't this sort of forgery exactly what DNSSEC is supposed to prevent?
(And no, don't go suggesting DNSCurve. It doesn't protect against your ISPs caching resolver being malicious like this.)
This isn't about the web, this is about the Internet--there's a difference. The web is just one tiny piece of the Internet, and there are 65,000 other services that require a properly functioning domain name system. Screwing it up in a way that only "works" for the web is totally unacceptable.
I'm not sure if this is a troll or not, but just in case it isn't: openDNS does the same sort of hijacking.
If you're using TekSavvy, then you're using TS's DNS servers, so your query goes to TS's DNS server which should respond with NXDOMAIN. You aren't even contacting the Bell DNS, so there's no opportunity for them to interfere.
It's possible, since Bell controls the last mile, that they could intercept NXDOMAIN results going to your machine and replace them using DPI, but I can't see how they'd get away with that without being in violation of CRTC rules about changing the meaning of communication. And, at least for me on Primus, this doesn't seem to be the case (yet).
Then you've never used Cisco's VPN client.
Hint: Connecting to internal-machine.yourcompany.com over the VPN doesn't work when internal-machine.yourcompany.com can be resolved from outside the company.
I have Charter, and they do the same thing . I just use 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 as my primary DNS servers. Although, I can't really speak to their IPv6 capability.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
if the problem is what it is to solve -- unlikely.
Unlikely indeed. A simple search on that site for "Test" turns up many results. Several of them have notes like this next to them: "Sponsored by: www.momshomeroom.com/msn ", and "Sponsored by: www.Tests.com "
Looks like helping the customer is a secondary concern after all.
The web is an incredibly huge piece of the internet.
Please tell us about these 65,000 other services that need a properly functioning DNS. Since the only protocol affected here is HTTP, and the only applications that use invalid URLs are either human-driven (browsers) or malware, I suggest that the NX response is fundamentally outdated and useless.
Not true. The DNS doesn't know if the thing making a request is a web browser or something else, so it affects literally every protocol. SMTP, POP3, SMB, everything. Only now, when you try to debug something like that it looks like the server does exist, it's just ignoring SMTP connections. You spend ages barking up completely the wrong tree.
Even more fun is if the person affected is trying to work from home over a VPN link. If it's set up for split tunnelling, it'll try to resolve a hostname using the default DNS first and only if that fails will it try the VPN. Hint: Windows uses DNS to resolve hostnames for fileshares. All of a sudden, internalhost.yourcompany.com resolves on the public internet and they're trying to save their files to a server that's run by their ISP (and, naturally, isn't offering any SMB fileshares). Cue a bunch of angry calls to the helpdesk.
No, every protocol directed at an address obtained by DNS is affected.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The first hit for me is the wonderful errornerd.com, which can fix these errors if you download their registry utility.
They can even fix a host of other errors, even 404s and errornerd.com is a fraud errors.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
I have written scripts for my job, which would break dns was hijacked by my isp. It's not acceptable.
;-)
I added a stub section to an article on wikipedia about this a while ago, it would be great if someone would lengthen it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking#Use_by_ISPs
I fear the Y2038 bug
A really douchy, I mean helpful, move by Bell would be to have every conceivable service running on the machine these DNS queries are redirected to, that would be configured to somehow convey the fact that the queried server doesn't exist, and possibly to display some ads. Like if a person tries to check for their email from IMAP the server would blindly accept any login credentials and return a mailbox with one mail with the subject "Invalid domain" and some adverts as contents. An SMB share would have folders named "Invalid" and "Domain". The possibilities are endless. Think of how convenient and helpful this would be.
The web is an incredibly huge piece of the internet.
Please tell us about these 65,000 other services that need a properly functioning DNS. Since the only protocol affected here is HTTP, and the only applications that use invalid URLs are either human-driven (browsers) or malware, I suggest that the NX response is fundamentally outdated and useless.
Wow, you are one clueless user. Please don't put fingers to keyboard and start talking authoritatively when you clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject or the problem at hand. Think before you type, next time.
Maybe you've heard of a little thing called "email?" It pretty much takes a huge chunk bandwidth on the net (mostly spam, granted), and then we have P2P stuff, which takes up the bulk of bandwidth I believe - far, far exceeding the HTTP protocol. These are just two of the services that are affected by it, and both exceed web traffic by significant margins. The web bandwidth is indeed a tiny fraction compared to everything else... just because web surfing dominates your life does not make it the dominate service on the internet.
The NX response is everything. It's the foundation of the entire domain resolution system. Saying it's outdated is absolutely and patently ludicrous. There are two proper responses that drive the entire internet, the return of a valid IP address and an NX response. When you start screwing with either one of those, you break the internet. Outdated indeed.
They're reselling InfoSpace. Click on this link to demonstrate.
InfoSpace claims to be passing search queries to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and Twitter, then combining the results. I'm surprised they can do that. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all prohibit that in their terms of service. (With Google, you're only allowed to use Google's display format, expressed in their AJAX API, but you can add additional info. Google doesn't allow reordering or combining their results. Yahoo is more flexible; you can reorder, reformat, and, subject to some restrictions, add ads. Bing allows reordering and combining for Web searches, but not other types of searches.)
How did this ever get +5 ? Seriously, if you register a non-existant domain, they won't hi-jack you. First, there's this thing called TTL on requests, when a DNS server caches a response from an authoritative source, it is not permanent. It has a Time to Live, defined in the Start of Authority in the zone on the master server or on the entry itself. So after a while, the DNS server will query the authoritative source again to make sure its answer is still correct and up to date. This is also implemented for NXDOMAIN queries, as defined in RFC2308. Section 3 is specific that NXDOMAIN queries should also return the SOA and that the receiving cache is to use the minimum TTL (the last value in the SOA). The default on this is 3600 seconds, or you guessed it, 1 hour. Since your domain will take 24-48 hours to show up on the ccTLDs or gTLDs anyhow, 1 hour isn't going to make or break anything as far as caching a NXDOMAIN answer and anyway, you wouldn't have gotten that traffic to begin with.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
These pages are helpful for the typical web surfer.
Do you work in marketing?
Clue: DNS stands for "Domain Name Service", not "Targeted Advertisement Injection". The "typical web surfer" already has a tool that is responsible for handling unresolvable addresses, it's built into the browser. If you want more help, suggestions for typo fixing, etc. then the browser is the proper location.
There are client programs out there that rely on getting proper DNS responses, including correct "domain not found" replies when the domain does not exist.
Yes, it breaks some scripts and runs contrary to published standards, but it presents a new (actually pretty old) conception of how the web should work.
No, it doesn't. And running contrary to published standards isn't a minor offense. They're called standards for a reason, and client-side programs expect a certain behaviour. Breaking that means breaking customers' software. And no, the web should not work this way. If you want to get a search page on DNS error, a Firefox plugin would be the proper approach, not DNS manipulation.
What this is is the equivalent of your phone company hijacking every call with a mistyped phone number to a toll line with a "helpful" operator that helps you guess the correct number. The only difference is the payment method.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I've made the point before, but it's worth pointing out again that this is just typosquatting on a massive scale.
.COM domain names that are one character misspellings of any Alexa top 100,000 site you enter. It also displays screenshots of those typosquatting sites. It's a nifty way to get a quick idea of the rampant growth of typosquatting. Here's an example that shows the 425 registered .COM domain names that are one character away from google.com.
Many people don't realize that there's TONS of traffic going to typo domains (whether registered or not). For instance, youtuve.com (notice the v instead of the b) got 347,852 visitors over the last 31 days. It redirects to another domain for cloaking purposes, but here is the traffic report. This level of traffic provides the financial incentive to implement these DNS schemes.
By the way, there's a new, free typosquatting scan tool at aliasencore.com. It shows you all the registered
Full disclosure: I am Graham MacRobie, the CEO of Alias Encore, Inc. We help companies recover cybersquatting domain names, but we focus solely on "slam-dunk" typosquatting cases (obviously only registered domain names). I can speak from personal experience in this field that the very last thing we need is wholesale typosquatting at the DNS level. Bell Canada should turn this "feature" off immediately.
. So whether or not the DNS server returns the proper error message or resolves to a site is *meaningless* for any piece of software to rely on.
Just like a server that inherently trusts the client is broken, so is any software that makes assumptions about a remote site just because it exists.
Knowing whether a site exists can still provide useful information for a wide variety of uses. Nobody is using the existence of a server as a form of authentication, okay? We have other mechanisms for verifying the identity of a site, when such identification is important. As the simplest example of how this screws things up, having a valid NX response versus a made up lie of a response will make the difference between an app failing immediately because the NX response says the server doesn't exist, versus waiting and eventually timing out trying to connect to a server that doesn't exist, but the app doesn't know it's because the server is slow, or the service is down, or the packet filter rules are eating your packets.
Just because you don't know or understand how this breaks things doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The behavior of identifying typosquatters and directing the user to the site they intended is properly implemented in the web browser. Not by fucking up one of the fundamental protocols of the internet. The web isn't the internet. And this behavior is broken even for the web.
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