Very nicely done: reporting this as abuse to the companies offering these affiliate programs seems quite appropriate, and it sounds like they reacted appropriately. One person complaining to an ISP is noise; one person making an abuse report is all it takes to get that ISP banned from the affiliate program.
If the ISP was being transparent about where they were going to source traffic I'm surprised that they ever got onto the affiliate program in the first place.
Cox does something similar but bypasses the the DNS records and just slipstreams in a response. I noticed Cox would redirect javascript requests to their own HTTP server and put in their own snippets, effectively doing mass javascript injection.
The snippet ended up being some sort of alert about upcoming maintenance, but using a malicious technique for a benign purpose is the path to the dark side. Use HTTPS!
If your ISP and/or Aspira were making any significant amount of affiliate commissions, I would be surprised if the merchants do not take action against them for fraud.
I chatted with a company that investigates affiliate fraud, they may have a blog post up after the new year about this. Will submit it if/when they do.
The ISPs that I've heard of using this claim to be getting low to mid thousands per month in revenue from it. I'm not sure if that counts as a significant amount of commission, but...
The cynical side of me says that the ISP is just going to redirect the author's traffic to the "pure" DNS server in the future (even when he or she directs traffic to the main one) unless they get in serious enough trouble with one of the companies this first time.
If anyone wants to do this in the future, I'd recommend just sending affiliate abuse emails with no notice to the ISP. Also, the future person may want to revise the [2] script to scan in a more surreptitious manner (change the order, add delays, simulate legit web traffic, etc).
Eric, I am very sorry to see this happen to you. Unfortunately more and more companies are using our data for marketing purposes.
All is not lost though.
There are several ways you can protect yourself from these practices. The first thing I would do is get a router capable of using dnscrypt-proxy (http://www.opendns.com/technol.... Then you can be confident that your DNS traffic is not being modified by your ISP. It does require that you have trust in a 3rd party DNS provider like OpenDNS, but at the end of the day you have to trust someone to provide DNS lookups.
The second option is to setup DNSSEC so that you can verify where your DNS responses are coming from. While people will still be able to intercept what sites you're looking up, at least you know you're getting valid responses which is better than your situation is currently.
Third is to use both. =)
Anyhow, really awesome to see people standing against these practices. It takes users complaining to make change. The sad truth of the matter.
I only said OpenDNS was one of the options. There are many DNSCrypt enabled servers not run by OpenDNS. Seems anytime someone event mentions OpenDNS the same arguments get brought back up. If you don't like OpenDNS, then use DNSCrypt with another server. Simple solution.
As a ISP when we were considering using Aspira they claimed that no referral tokens would be replaced and that the only behavior was injecting a popup coupon window.
I decided not to proceed with it because it seemed like a support nightmare and tampering with non-malicious subscriber traffic crosses a line.
Their marketing affiliates (such as Cash4Trafik) are always reaching out to CEO types at small ISPs and the money they bring (particularly when you are small) can be hard to pass up.
It may be the cynic in me after seeing abuses for companies like Cash4Gold, but "Cash4" anything does not instill any amount of trust in a brand, at least to me.
Just a little Rural Wireless/Fiber+Metro Datacenter/whatever provider in Southeastern Wisconsin. I try to keep my personal opinion at least one step removed from their name just in case :-) My email is in my profile. If you need a connection in that geographic area hit me up and I'll see what we can do.
Super shady stuff. I never rely on any ISP provided DNS servers. I'm glad you talked to the the etailers to let them know what was going on. These business practices do introduce latency, regardless of what he told you. Not to mention, they are highly unethical and dishonest.
That's what my ISP does. What's worse is that sometimes their dns servers fail intermittently (something to do with fragmented packets and retrying DNS queries in TCP mode).
It did take a while to figure out what was causing the intermittent DNS failures. "My ISP is hijacking all port 53 traffic" was fairly low on my list of possibilities, I must admit.
Fortunately it's not that hard to run a local resolver that forwards queries to an external resolver on a vps on an alternate port.
I'd switch ISPs, but I live in a remote area and my only other choices would be satellite or cellular, so I'm stuck with them.
If that were the case, I would immediately terminate any relationship with them and out them in public. While technically possible, you're now talking about a whole other form of dishonest behavior. Some would say criminal.
DNSCrypt is useless. Yeah, they can't see that you did a DNS A record lookup for www.example.com, but they can still see your subsequent TCP connection to the IP you received in your encrypted DNS response, and see the HTTP Host header that your browser sends. Even if it's a HTTPS connection, modern browsers leak the hostname then too, due to SNI.
Signing DNS responses has much more value than encrypting them.
If you set up DNSCrypt with OpenDNS, you're not improving the situation. You're just adding an additional third party that can see what you're doing.
Why do you keep posting this? It's irrelevant because the idea isn't to hide what site you're visiting, it's to prevent the ISP from modifying the DNS responses. Signing DNS responses would be helpful if that was actually enforced anywhere.
DNSCrypt is a perfectly fine solution for this threat model.
I posted a similar comment twice in response to different people. There is nothing wrong with this.
The rest of your comment is irrelevant as it assumes I'm replying to the article rather than to the parent comment. The parent stated that he uses "DNSCrypt in all situations." I don't want people to think this is a good idea.
Are you using Shaw's DNS servers? I don't remember dealing with NXDOMAIN issues when I had Shaw, but I have run my own DNS servers for a long time now.
It doesn't matter what DNS servers I specify; Shaw intercepts all DNS requests. I can even make up a nonexistent DNS server as long as it's internet-routable, and will get a valid response from Shaw. This works, for example:
All that means is that you're using their recursive DNS servers. They can configure these any way they choose. Stop using third party recursive DNS servers and you will not have problems with unwanted advertising and NXDOMAIN hijacking.
Run your own recurive DNS server (e.g. dnscache) on 127.0.0.1.
Alternatively, query authoritative servers directly. Use a port other than 53 if you really think your ISP is trying to filter your outgoing queries; I sincerely doubt they would bother.
192.5.6.30 is an authoritative .com server. Memorize that number.
And you should receive the IP address for news.ycombinator.com, or at least your next clue where to look (if the DNS admin has chosen to play games with CNAME).
This method can be automated.
Your ISP is not "intercept[ing] all DNS requests". You are sending your requests to your ISP's recursive DNS servers (why?), and those servers are feeding you whatever information the ISP chooses. Go figure, they are sending you bogus info to inject advertising. Solution: Stop sending your requests to your ISP's recursive DNS servers (or any third party recursive DNS servers). Send your requests to your own recursive DNS server running on 127.0.0.1, or send nonrecursive requests to authoritative DNS servers only.
"dig @www.facebook.com news.ycombinator.com" does not use the ISP's DNS servers at all. It sends a DNS query to Facebook for Google, which should normally fail. His ISP hijacks the request and provides a response. In this scenario, the advice in your comment is pointless because they will hijack requests whether they are directly to authoritative servers or if they are to recursive servers.
""dig @www.facebook.com news.ycombinator.com" does not use the ISP's DNS servers at all"
Incorrect. The program he's using, dig, has to look up the numbers for facebook.com's authoritative servers first. And what DNS servers do you think it uses to do that? The defaults he has set: his ISP's.
"It sends a DNS query to Facebook for Google."
Incorrect again.
The "advice" I provided is not pointless. I would not provide pointless suggestions.
I am glad you asked. I am not getting what it is you
are trying to say. I also do not get why you keep
mentioning Google.
"The query for Facebooks server may use the ISPs DNS server,
but that's not the problem."
Why is that not the problem?
If you query the ISP's DNS servers, then the ISP can send you bogus answers. By giving you bogus answer they can redirect
your HTTP requests, which enables them to insert ads, among
other things. I presume you would want to avoid this. I
gave examples how you could do that. One way is to run your
own recursive DNS server on 127.0.0.1. Another is to only
query the proper authoritative servers.
Shaw uses a "DNS Redirect service". Customers can opt out.
Even if a customer does not disable this "service", I believe Shaw will not interfere with packets sent to remote DNS servers other than Shaw's.
In any event, the reason I commented on this was because (unless the customer has changed his defaults)
dig @www.facebook.com news.ycombinator.com
sends queries to Shaw's DNS servers. So stop doing this.
Unless the customer opts out, these queries are going to
get redirected.
If you wanted to test your theory (that Shaw is redirecting
every DNS packet sent by evey customer, even ones not using
Shaw's DNS servers), then the above invocation of dig will
not test this. It sends queries to the Shaw DNS servers.
Stop doing that.
Why does it send queries to Shaw's DNS servers? From
the dig(1) manpage:
"SIMPLE USAGE
A typical invocation of dig looks like:
dig @server name type
where:
server
is the name or IP address of the name server to query. This can be
an IPv4 address in dotted-decimal notation or an IPv6 address in
colon-delimited notation. When the supplied server argument is a
hostname, dig resolves that name before querying that name server.
If no server argument is provided, dig consults /etc/resolv.conf
and queries the name servers listed there. The reply from the name
server that responds is displayed.
"
If for some reason you wanted to send a query for
news.ycombinator.com to the IP address for www.facebook.com
(without using any recursive DNS servers like Shaw's which
could give you bogus answers), then
dig +norecurse @31.13.75.17 news.ycombinator.com
would be the appropriate way to do it, assuming you choose
to use dig.
Your claim was they are proxying "all" port 53 traffic.
In effect, you are saying no customer can query any DNS
server except Shaw's.
That sounds a bit extreme.
I have more questions. Can you run some tests?
You say you use DNSCrypt. Can you try it with port 53?
Maybe something like
dnscrypt-proxy --resolver-port=53
and
dnscrypt-proxy --resolver-port=53 --tcp-only
DNSCrypt is built using public domain software written by a
maths professor: namely, djbdns and curvecp.
Now, without DNSCrypt, can you try using djbdns? For me at
least, it is easier to understand what the software does.
dig and the BIND libraries are far too complex for my liking.
Compile or get binaries for djbdns and use dnsq(1).
dnsq a news.ycombinator.com 31.13.75.17
If you get no response immediately, wait at least 60 seconds
for a time out.
Finally, compile or get binaries for drill(1) from NLnet
Labs.
I'm genuinely curious about your situation. Shaw is
no doubt playing games with their DNS, but I'm still not
convinced they are "proxy[ing] all port 53 traffic".
I know that some ISP's block all traffic sent to port 25.
But they have a compelling reason and hence a justification
for doing that. Not true with proxying traffic to port 53.
There's no harm in customers using DNS servers besides
Shaw's.
I've done some more tests [1] as you suggested. It looks like Shaw is routing all UDP/53 traffic to their DNS servers; I'd not considered TCP earlier. My optimistic guess as to their motivation for using such an invasive technique is that it was easy for them to deploy.
Personally, I do not use DNS much at all except to do periodic bulk lookups for new domains I might visit.
I store all the DNS info I'll ever use[1] in .cdb files and also in my /etc/hosts file.
I do this for speed reasons, because HOSTS or tinydns on 127.xxx.xxx.xxx is always faster than DNS. But if I had an ISP like yours, it would be a necessity for other reasons.
Shaw is actually interfering with their customers' ability to lookup IP numbers. This is the most basic of all internet services.
And no one is complaining?
Anyway, you could do bulk lookups with TCP and then store the DNS info locally.
That could reduce if not elimibate your need for DNS.
I've always thought that there should be DNS servers that can handle pipelined TCP queries, and this is one reason why.
If the idea of bulk lookups and not using DNS otherwise sounds intriguing and you want some examples of scripts to do bulk lookups, e.g. for HN sites, let me know. It sounds like you could really benefit from reducing your dependence on DNS.
1. For example, all the IP addresses for sites that appear on HN.
No. For example you set up your own resolvers and use those for your network's DNS needs. The source IP's from your resolvers recursive requests will be used to help CDNs and other geo-aware resolvers send you to the nearest appropriate site.
You don't trust your ISP, so you go for the one company whose entire profit model is build around ads and profiling their users, and who is known to cooperate (willingly and/or unwillingly) with the NSA in their logging programs? I'm not sure that's the right response...
Edit: I did a little research on CDN resolution back in undergrad. One of the things that was most difficult to measure, or even define, was DNS "performance."
Just because Google anycasts its DNS network does not guarantee the best performance. Running namehelp[1] on many machines I often found that the "fastest" DNS server was not in the obvious set of DNS servers that you use.
So I guess the answer to the parent's question is: yes, possibly, but it's hard to define what "fastest" even means here. I would say that jrockway's response is even incorrect in his (implied) definite assertion that it cannot degrade your experience. If you want to know, you should measure from your endpoint. There is no other way.
It told me my the fastest option for me was Dyn's servers, but those have unacceptable to me anti-spyware "safe mode" blockouts. #2 on its list was Google DNS which I was already using.
The graphs for HTTP performance said namehelp's choices were degrading my performance on average by 11ms.
Good app to add to the toolchest though. It'll be interesting to try it out when I travel.
"We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."
What other expectations for a DNS server do you have? If you do a lookup for example.com's A record, it's going to know that someone looked up the A record for example.com.
As I mention in a related comment, if you're worried about the NSA knowing what websites you visit, you must not use TCP/IP. TCP/IP has no provision for obscuring the source and destination of packets; you have to add that at another layer.
(To wax philosophical, it seems that we're outgrowing the Internet. Nobody was worried about protecting their browsing history from their ISP or the government when the Internet was designed, so when we start talking about "if you use XXX service, the NSA can find out", that's true of pretty much everything except for things specially designed to hide browsing history from the NSA. Even those can be suspected to be compromised, meaning you shouldn't even be here commenting if you're truly worried about what information a DNS server might collect from you.)
I think you would be hard pressed to find a public well known service that is depended on ISP CDNs.
Google? No. Games? No. JS libraries? No.
Even if some might use CDNs, they are likely to also use geo-aware DNS servers. It cheap, don't cost anything, and can be combined with CDNs on ISP level.
I think so too, though CDN's will mess with the results a bit. It would be nice if DNS had a way to sign/validate/somehow know the record you got was correct. Especially on the apex record as it can happen before ssl.
CDNs will indeed mess with the results, but it would still likely be possible to tell the difference between a legitimate result and a forged one, especially if you know something about the CDN structures used by major site. And the more people run it, the more likely you can detect anomalies, much like Perspectives does for SSL.
SSL, incidentally, seems like a major help here: you could detect common DNS hijackings by accessing the site via SSL. If you access https://amazon.com/ , an ISP hijacking the site would produce either a certificate error or a connection failure (depending on whether they even attempt to listen for SSL traffic).
Perspectives is a new approach to helping computers communicate securely on the Internet. With Perspectives, public “network notary” servers regularly monitor the SSL certificates used by 100,000s+ websites to help your browser detect “man-in-the-middle” attacks without relying on certificate authorities.
This also shows a weakness in DNS. There is currently no
way to validate the DNS record you’re being served is what
the person hosting the website intended.
That's what DNSSEC is for, but it hasn't become pervasive enough yet to be able to depend on it.
Strangely enough, the largest deployment of DNSSEC-enabled, customer-facing, recursive/caching nameservers in the United States is... Comcast. That's right, the same Comcast that, back in 2009, hijacked NXDOMAIN responses by default and returned A records pointing to servers that served up advertisement-laden search pages over http.
Comcast's IPv6 network for content from Netflix or YouTube is actually better than using IPv4. A while back I set up an IPv6 only machine just to see the difference, and it is night and day.
That being said, their network still leaves something to be desired, the IPv6 routes taken to get to the same IPv6/IPv4 host can sometimes be circuitous and I have noticed that they have a higher latency too. So there are upsides and downsides, but I hope it can only get better with time!
Sadly DNSSEC kinda sucks. Here's some earlier discussion on HN, with a lot of links. (Namedrop: tptacek is against DNSSEC and talks about it in the link.)
TLDR: DNSSEC is kinda complex and hacko, doesn't protect you as much as you might think, and introduces a whole new PKI that you should probably trust even less than the current ones. But read the links above for the real story.
I'm using DNSCrypt right now, which (correct me if I'm wrong) protects against DNS interception by my ISP, and seems like a whole lot less trouble than DNSSEC.
Your ISP can still see the IP address of every web server that you connect to, and can still see the "Host" header that your browser sends in HTTP requests, and also in HTTPS requests (due to SNI) if you're using a reasonably modern OS/Browser combo.
All you've done is add an additional third party that can view and log what you're doing.
I did not forget that. The privacy lost is worse than the supposed "protection" gained by using DNSCrypt. "Trashy" ISPs can (and do) still intercept and modify the HTTP traffic even if they can't intercept and modify the DNS traffic.
Is there a way we can choke companies like Apira by making a concerted distributed effort to disrupt the referral programs they exploit (either by reporting them or by feeding them false referrals somehow)?
Agree with this sentiment, but I think the effort would be better spent taking steps to switch to trusted DNS providers, as well as building layperson tools to monitor them.
Here it goes:
Behind a ISP-wide cache.
Any 'traceroute' passes by transtelco.net (ISP used to have their own infraestructure for voip services Megafon) now i have 5/6? DNS jumps! and all my traffic going to Transtelco.
traceroute to news.ycombinator.com (198.41.191.47), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 customer-GDL-**-***.megared.net.mx << 177.230.**.*** Dynamic IP, GDL is the city of the company
2 10.0.28.62 (10.0.28.62) 8.939 ms 8.941 ms 8.935 ms
3 10.2.28.195 (10.2.28.195) 8.912 ms 8.903 ms 8.891 ms
4 pe-cob.megared.net.mx (189.199.117.***) 8.878 ms 8.866 ms 14.201 ms << COB is the user city
5 10.3.0.29 (10.3.0.29) 23.494 ms 23.483 ms 23.408 ms
6 10.3.0.13 (10.3.0.13) 22.842 ms 19.609 ms 19.596 ms
7 10.3.0.10 (10.3.0.10) 19.560 ms 19.555 ms 19.536 ms
8 201-174-24-233.transtelco.net (201.174.24.233) 19.527 ms 20.650 ms 19.468 ms
9 201-174-254-105.transtelco.net (201.174.254.105) 34.239 ms 31.793 ms 31.268 ms
10 fe3-5.br01.lax05.pccwbtn.net (63.218.73.25) 31.792 ms 31.736 ms 33.533 ms
11 any2ix.coresite.com (206.223.143.150) 32.834 ms 33.221 ms 33.429 ms
12 ae3-50g.cr1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.124.113) 41.288 ms 41.228 ms 41.231 ms
13 ae2-50g.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.127.142) 42.632 ms ae1-50g.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.127.138) 35.192 ms 33.860 ms
14 as13335.xe-11-0-6.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.125.106) 35.143 ms 44.714 ms 44.666 ms
15 198.41.191.47 (198.41.191.47) 37.638 ms 37.239 ms 36.997 ms
I don't know how normal or ethic is this type of cache. No download limits, I have the 10mb and get 20mb(2000-2300kbps) downloads, for uploads is limited to 1mb.
As long as they don't tamper with the data I think an HTTP cache is perfectly OK. HTTP has loads of built-in mechanism for that kind of caching. It saves bandwidth upstream, not least for website owners, and may make your web browsing speed faster if the proxy is good.
Tampering with the data, however, is not OK at all. In the U.S. I believe it may make the ISP exempt from for example the safe harbor clauses in the DMCA.
Some of the big content providers like Netflix are even reportedly making caching deals for their content. Both the content provider and the ISP get better performance and less exterior bandwidth.
Your traceroute doesn't show that you're behind a cache, just that your ISP uses transtelco.net for IP transit; at least to the destinations you tried.
One a slightly related note, in Chrome extensions, it's possible to redirect DNS requests on a per-URL basis. This is how Media Hint works to allow non-US Netflix users access the US version of the site.
I'm surprised we haven't seen similar behaviour from Chrome extensions. I'm sure it would be caught eventually, but this isn't exactly something that people tend to look for, so it would take a while for people to catch it.
> I'm surprised we haven't seen similar behaviour from Chrome extensions
The "Window Resizer" Chrome extension got a silent update a few weeks ago. It rewrote all the links on Google search result pages to point to a proxy that added affiliate links where possible.
Over the holiday I did usual, fix/clean my grandmother's computer. She's been using chrome because I explained to her how much safer it is.
I did a google search and realized something wasn't right. Uninstalled all the crapware apps that wormed their way in. And then I looked at the chrome extensions and low and behold there it was, more crapware.
I removed them and they re-added themselves. I had to run spybox s&d to remove it completely.
Moral of the story: chrome extensions are in some ways worse than toolbars.
Interestingly, you might have benefitted more from keeping quiet about this. While the original retailers are losing money through this, you aren't really affected negatively by them doing it. In fact, with this additional revenue source, they might be able to support thinner margins on their broadband charges, saving you some money. You did the morally correct thing, but perhaps at a potential personal cost.
The affiliates are getting hurt hugely though. Affiliate profits are supposed to be for helping the purchase - through marketing efficiency. The ISP is doing none of that, they are simply mafiosoing affiliate dollars through hijack. Amazon would not like this, the ISP gives exactly 0% efficiency boost to the e-commerce process, they're just a gypsie snake.
Why have you failed to visit an abortion clinic yet? You're not fit for children.
Gypsy: "An itinerant person or any person suspected of making a living from dishonest practices or theft; a member of a nomadic people, not necessarily Romani; a carny."
>you aren't really affected negatively by them doing it.
Even if you are fine with your ISP committing fraud, you are negatively effected by the complexity (points of failure) and latency this adds to the network.
I'd like to try out this curl command. I'm not using macports, though. Like many people, I've switched to brew since some time. Is there a quick way to see if my curl install is compiled with 'ares' whatever that is?
This works well for me. But I have found that this is the kind of thing where an expert can pop in and say "have you considered risk X with solution Y?" and leave me dumbfounded.
