The IT Nerd

Its bad enough that Rogers was caught altering web pages (which ticked off Google). But now it seems that Rogers appears to be redirecting invalid DNS requests to their own search and advertising page:

“The hijacking appears to be an attempt by Rogers to use its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to cash in on the mistakes of its users.”

Basically, what they are doing is hoping that you mistype the address of a website in your browser so that they can use that to display ads. This is bad for you because it is a huge security risk as it opens the door for hackers:

“The hacker could, for example, send spam e-mails to Earthlink subscribers with a link to a webpage on money.paypal.com. Visiting that link would take the victim to the hacker’s site, and it would look as though they were on a real PayPal page.”

Rogers has some balls to pull a stunt like this. Hopefully their customers have the balls to dump them for an ISP that is not this stupid.

UPDATE: A couple of my customers called me to ask me how to fix this. The simple thing to do is to not use Rogers DNS servers, so I did two service calls to configure their computers and routers to use the OpenDNS servers instead. At least when you mistype something, it tries to find you the correct web page and any advertisements that get displayed are for the purpose of keeping OpenDNS alive. Plus OpenDNS is WAY FASTER than Rogers DNS servers and WAY MORE RELIABLE too. Finally, you can filter out things like porn or other “evil” content. So, I figure if you’re going to see ads, at least get a better Internet experience out of it (not to mention a safer one). By the way, even if you don’t use Rogers, it’s a good idea to use OpenDNS instead of your ISPs DNS servers. Take a look at it today. It’s easy to make the switch.

UPDATE #2: If you really don’t want to be redirected to a search page with ads when making a typo on a domain name, you can still do that with OpenDNS.

You can sign up for a FREE account and then set up the option to turn off “typo correction”. You go in to the Dashboard at http://www.opendns.com and select “settings” and then “typo corrections” and then uncheck the box “enable typo correction”.

This turns off all redirection and returns the standard browser error page. OpenDNS then acts as a normal DNS server you can use to bypass ISP DNS servers that do DNS redirection. One thing to keep in mind is that if you turn off typo correction, then none of the blocking capabilities will work either. But if you don’t like ads, then go for it.

This entry was posted on July 19, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, Net Neutrality, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.