Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic In the US

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 5, 2011 @12:50AM from the par-for-the-course dept.

Peter Eckersley writes "The Netalyzr research project from the ICSI networking group has discovered that on a number of U.S. ISPs' networks, search traffic for Bing, Yahoo! and sometimes Google is being redirected to proxy servers operated by a company called Paxfire. In addition to posing a grave privacy problem, this server impersonation is being used to redirect certain searches away from the user's chosen search engine and to affiliate marketing programs instead. Further analysis is available in a post at the EFF."

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Re:Use HTTPS by Gaygirlie · 2011-08-05 01:04 · Score: 4, Interesting

I too have to recommend HTTPS everywhere, it's a great addon and makes it a lot safer to e.g. Surf the web over an unencrypted WIFI hotspot. And so far I haven't actually had a single glitch because of it.
Questions answered in this thread... by nweaver · 2011-08-05 01:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

I am one of the Netalyzr developers involved in this work. I or my colleagues will answer questions in this thread, but I may be offline for a little while so responses may be somewhat delayed at times.

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