Hacked Or Not?
Following up on the Google outage. Something weird is going on, as reader Brendan Loy points out. It has been on my mind as well.
they are using the *.com.net domain to catch dns queries from .com sites that people type incorrectly or the dns lookup fails, their internet explorer starts appending suffixes to the name to try and locate a site, they have a record for the name google.com.net so when a google.com lookup fails internet explorer trys adding .net to the end and finds the wrong site If it’s a wildcard, then how come http://www.google.com.net/ takes me to SoGo, but http://www.yahoo.com.net/ does not, nor does http://www.cnn.com.net/ or http://www.brendanloy.com.net/ or any other replacement for the “wildcard” that I’ve tried?
Pinging http://www.com.net [206.125.101.12] with 32 bytes of data
Pinging http://www.google.com.net [206.125.101.12] with 32 bytes of data
the same format for msn, aol, or yahoo doesn’t resolve. Clearly this is NOT a wild card, but an attempt to capitalize specifically on Google mistyped traffic.
You might want to ask Gregg Squires, gr3gmne-verislime@yahoo.com , who’s registered as the owner of com.net, about this – he also owns mne.com, and sogosearch.com.
No big secret. com.net is owned by SoGoSearch.com. They obviously have a mapping for http://www.google.com.net because they know that IE would send people their in case of a DNS problem.
Having same issue with yahoo.com and msn.com now. on some pc’s, it forwards to answerferret.com when you type in http://www.yahoo.com. Is there a fix for this?
Having same issue w/ redirection to sogosearch for google, and to answerferret for yahoo. Frustratingly little info online about a fix for this. Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? 🙂