Canadian Broadband → Eastlink DNS Hijacking...

Just a heads up to anyone who is on Eastlink in Canada (located in Halifax). Eastlink this past week has decided to dabble in DNS hijacking.

I've opted out twice so far. It's nice to suddenly find all your computer names no longer resolve properly to internal addresses but resolve out to search.eastlink.ca instead.

Google thread:
»groups.google.com/group/ ··· ot&pli=1

To opt out: »searchmanager.eastlink.c ··· ink&lang

opting out only disables this for a limited time.

Eastlink support guy said that "this is a corporate decision" and I had no options other than to switch ISPs... (thanks...)

I've created a simple script to continually "opt out"
#!/bin/bash
wget -O /dev/null »searchmanager.eastlink.ca /optout.php?brand=eastlink&lang= 2> /dev/null

Two options I think will work.
1) a cron job run every minute or so like calling the above script

2) a while true loop running the above script as follows:
(while true; do bin/optOutEastlinkSearch.sh; sleep 10; done)

Why don't you set up your connection to use a
different DNS server?

In windows it would be under network connections/your connection name/properties/internet protocol (TCP/IP)/properties/use the following DNS server addresses/

try 4.2.2.1 as preferred

alternates: 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.5

opendns.com will work too -

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

etc. etc.

What eastlink/rogers/bell are doing is NETWORK ABUSE
because it violates RFC standard for DNS (NXDOMAIN) responses.

You do take the risk, if you use an external DNS provider,
of setting yourself up for a potential DNS hijack which could
end up as a phishing/pharming vulnerability. Caveat Emptor -
but the ones I have listed above have been tested and used for 2+ years and my bank account and credit cards are still the correct amounts...;)

and when opendns charges you money....

Do what you should have done in the first place rather than use OpenDNS--install and use your own DNS Cache.

As for what happens if/when Eastlink blocks your external access to remote DNS servers...well, we'll talk about that when it happens.

Before running my own recursive DNS I used:
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
With great success. Note they are not openDNS, but level3? dns.

I switched to opendns when that option fails indeed we'll go from there.

Ahwell.