netalyzr

Nearly 2 percent of all US Internet users suffer from "malicious" domain name system (DNS) servers that don't properly turn website names like google.com into the IP addresses computers need to communicate on the 'Net. And, to make matters worse, the problem isn't caused by hackers or malware, but by the local ISPs people pay for access to the Internet. Though the 2 percent number might sound low, it's astonishingly high for a core Internet function, as is clear from the fact that no other country—apart from Haiti—sees more than 0.17 percent malicious DNS servers. What's gone wrong in America?

Try this: open up a new tab and type “kindle” into the address bar. Chances are it will send you to a Google search results page. That is, unless the ISP is intercepting such rogue queries and doing what they will with them. A pair of computer scientists at UC Berkeley have found that at least a dozen ISPs are still doing this, the result being that, for example, when someone types “kindle” into the address bar, it doesn’t go to your preferred search results, but directly to Amazon’s Kindle page.

Some Internet Service Providers who work with third-party proxy servers may be redirecting and possibly hijacking their users’ search queries, according to a blog posted last Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which worked in collaboration with UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers. Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute, a campus-affiliated institute, began their work over two years ago and discovered that some service providers routed brand-related term searches in the search engines Yahoo!, Bing and Google to brand websites instead of the intended search engine results.

Takeaway: Do you trust the results returned from your chosen search engine? Michael Kassner looks into search engine hijacking and redirection.