Canadian ISP Hijacking DNS Lookup Errors

Freshly Exhumed tips us to news that Canadian ISP Rogers Cable appears to be redirecting invalid DNS requests to their own search and advertising page. Roadrunner got caught doing the same thing earlier this year. According to the article, "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." Freshly Exhumed also reminds us, "As IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky has warned in the past, this presents a very serious security problem."

Good Grief

I know one problem it can cause is for a number of spam tests which look for the message coming from a legitimate domain. When the DNS server says "yup, that resolves" even when there's actually no domain, the test is defeated.

Re:Good Grief

What the hell? Verizon is doing this now, too. Whenever I type in 'slashdot' in firefox, it just takes me to their useless search page, which is getting REALLY old now. I'm getting pretty disgusted now, and they should get it through their thick heads that if they're gonna charge us money for 'net access, they have NO right to make more money off of us by selling ads instead of allowing our browsers to function as expected.

Re:Good Grief

Verizon has been doing this for a while. I read the Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, etc. every time they update it. It's clearly there, disguised as a 'feature' called DNS Assistance.

However, Verizon does have non-poisoned DNS servers which you can find in their Help pages, along with instructions for changing your machine's settings. http://netservices.verizon.net/portal/link/help/item&objId=23883 [verizon.net]

Re:Good Grief

They tried to get me to use their poisoned servers, and as soon as I found out (btw, they DO report nxdomain, along with their error handling servers), I went back to the old ones.

The poisoned ones were 68.237.161.12 (nsnyny01.verizon.net) and 71.250.0.12 (nsnwrk01.verizon.net), and the unpoisoned ones are 151.202.0.85 and 151.203.0.85.

-uso.

Re:Good Grief

Verizon's non-poisoned dns servers are vulnerable to the newly discovered dns vulnerability. Shout at them!

151.202.0.85 is POOR: 26 queries in 2.1 seconds from 22 ports with std dev 19.03

151.203.0.85 is POOR: 26 queries in 2.4 seconds from 22 ports with std dev 15.08

Check for your self using `dig porttest.dns-oarc.net. in txt`

Re:Good Grief

4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2

Re:Run your own

opendns.com does the very mangling I want to avoid and calls it a feature. At least they tell you they are doing it, and use it for stuff that could benefit end users (filtering allowed site names) as well as their own advertising. But it doesn't solve the problem. It is just a more "open" and up front version of the problem.

The Verizon Annoyance...

You can "opt out" of the Verizon annoyance by modifying your DNS address by adding "2" to the last octet.

I've had to do this, and it works. No annoying Verizon snatching my failed DNS lookups!

Of course, if you try to get this out of their so-called "tech support", they will not know what you're asking for until you manage to get down to tier 2 or 3 or so. Amazing as it sounds, teir-one Verizon Fios tech support will glaze over at the mere mention of DNS, and will stupidly keep trying to get you to do inane things with your browser.

Re:

Unfortunately, this is possible only for their PPPoE users. Customers outside of their northeast service area don't use PPPoE, and it's not possible to change the DNS servers in these non-PPPoE cases with the routers supplied by Verizon. >:(

Re:Good Grief

AdBlock gets rid of the Verizon "search" page.

Clickity, clickity, never see again.

Re:Good Grief

According to Paul Vixie, Level3 operators have said that they plan to restrict access to these servers in future to customers only, so make sure you have an alternative available!

Re:Good Grief

Maybe I don't understand the complaint. <snip> Only a few of us prefer the old 404 error and most want suggestions on where to link to.

I think the most annoying aspect is how we get used to leaving off the 'www' at the beginning of domains with Firefox, and Firefox adds it in for you if the non-www address fails to resolve. With this DNS hijacking this feature is broken.

Well I'll be...

This must be brand new. I did a test just now and a bad URL sends you here:

http://www20.search.rogers.com/search?

With appropriate variables substituted for what you were typing of course, like this:

Enter: http://www.rogersblowz.com and you get:

http://www20.search.rogers.com/search?qo=www.rogersblowz.com&rn=mEelOh0JrKFZejZ

Let the debate rage on!!!

Re:Well I'll be...

Worse than this even. I've been redirected to Rogers Search pages, replete with advertising, for domains that I know exist, and that I know have been entered correctly (e.g. via a bookmark).

It used to happen a lot with http://ragnartornquist.com/ [ragnartornquist.com] (Tornquist is a senior game designer for Funcom). Granted that's a tough name to spell properly for a North American, but since I'd click on a bookmarked link, or a google page, I was sure it wasn't a problem with my typing.

What started to give it away as being something at Rogers (rather than my computer infected with malware) was that this was happening on every device I connected to the net -- Lynx on BSD, Safari on Apple, Opera on Maemo, Iceweasel on Ubuntu, and, of course, Firefox/IE/Opera on Windows.

(Yeah, I have a lot of different OS's sitting around!)

For a while I then became convinced my router had been compromised, but even switching routers didn't fix it.

Concluding it was unlikely that five different OSes and myriad different browsers had all been compromised, as well as two different routers, I contacted Rogers.

They said they were experimenting with "Software Improvements" and that the problem should go away for existing domains.

Well, using a proxy fixed it for me. But not a pleasant solution.

Software Improvements.

And the problem did go away for me at least. But I wonder if anyone else is being redirected to Rogers garbage pages for domains which exist.

Holmwood.

easy solution

http://www.opendns.com/ [opendns.com]

basically it is remove your ISP's dns#s and add these

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Re:easy solution

so, how long before your ISP starts blocking use of DNS servers other than their own?

Re:

already happening here in italy... both the ads on false page and i can not use opendns nor OpenRootServerNetvork

Re:easy solution

no, they're doing the exact same thing.
they're redirecting invalid requests to
http://guide.opendns.com/?url=%5Burl.here%5D [opendns.com]

$ host aoeuidhtns.com
Host aoeuidhtns.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

$ host aoeuidhtns.com 208.67.222.222
aoeuidhtns.com has address 208.69.34.132

Re:easy solution

... which you can manually stop them from doing by disabling typo corrections in settings.

Re:easy solution

Funny thing is that OpenDNS also re-directs bad URLs to their search page. So really, how much better is it? ;)

Ignore their servers

If the ISP is messing with the DNS service, the best thing to do is to use a different service.

For Linux/Unix users, you can just run a caching-only server on the desktop system, and it will issue its own name requests from the root on down. I've been doing a slightly more complex version of this at home for VPN purposes. (Forward requests to my employer's net to the private internal DNS server (through the VPN), while querying the public internet for all other servers.)

I don't know it a similar option is available for Windows users w/o shelling out big bucks, but it is technically feasible

If you cannot run a caching-only server, another option is to use a third-party DNS server. The only problem here is that it would not be automagically configured by DHCP, and would have to be manually set up.

What would be the danger...

This type of behavior is wrong on so many levels so I wonder what would be the danger of having ICANN police this type of behavior? It seems that ISPs are doing more and more to circumvent "standards" for their own gain. Would it be too much to ask ICANN to come up with a set of rules that ALL ISPs must adhere to or risk losing their netblock? I'm not even sure ICANN would do anything but I'm just posing the question.

Fantastic.

Let me guess... They either already have, or soon will in a pitiful pretense of response to criticism, offer some sort of insanely weak opt-out mechanism.

I'm guessing one of two things:
Manually configure alternate DNS servers on a per device basis(a la Verizon's current setup, may they be thrice cursed)
or:
Something involving cookies, a la Phorm and friends.

For things like this, opt-out just isn't good enough.

PaxFire

[This is Dan Kaminsky]

I took a look at what Rogers is doing. They're using PaxFire, who indeed was directly vulnerable to the attacks I described at Toorcon a few months ago. PaxFire fixed their stuff up, but yes, the security of the web at Rogers is limited to the security of those ad servers at PaxFire.

Add Insight to the list

I guess the thought with the ISP's nowadays is that "everybody else is doing it, why can't we?"