dentman42
join:2001-10-02
Columbus, OH
 ·AT&T Midwest
| reply to woody7
Re: Not happening on Earthlink Cable Customers
There's someone out there doing this for URLs without a domain name, though it doesn't seem to happen on all ISPs (I've seen it on Road Runner, Cox, Comcast and BellSouth for sure, and I think I've seen it on SBC/ATT). I first discovered it because of my employer's VPN - people try to access an internal site (no domain name, for example "http://homepage") while not on the VPN and get redirected to "Future home of .homepage information.com". I've tried this on my own machines with no VPN software installed and duplicated the results - basically any URL without a domain gets redirected instead of failing a DNS lookup, and the "information.com" page (IP always in the range 69.x.x.x) will pop up a couple more windows if popups are not blocked, at least one of which usually attempts a drive-by download. I'm really surprised I haven't seen this mentioned here as it started almost a year ago. |
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dentman42
join:2001-10-02
Columbus, OH
·AT&T Midwest
| Just did another test. Created an SBC/ATT dialup connection (had DSL for 7 months, first time I've used the dialup!) to verify that I get redirected on this connection. Put "homepage" in the address bar in IE and got the information.com page (no "future home of" blurb this time) - resolved to 69.25.212.180. (First attempt it failed due to an earlier attempt to block the page - I had to rename my hosts file which was redirecting urlforwarding.domainsite.com, searchportal.information.com, and ppc-parked.domainsite.com to localhost). This was as much of the redirect as I have been able to trace. Since it occurs on many ISPs, you guys should be able to duplicate the redirect. |
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