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[ NNSquad ] Karoo is DNS hijacking


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/25/kraoo_nds_typo_hjakin/

Something fishy about DNS hijacking
By Chris Williams → More by this author
Published Tuesday 25th March 2008 11:33 GMT
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Hull's broadband monopoly, Karoo, has joined the ranks of Verisign,
Tiscali and Orange in redirecting net users' mistyped URLs to pages
displaying advertising.

Karoo, part of the K-Com group, is doing the hijacking in partnership with
Ask.com.

Instead of seeing a plain error, customers are seeing their spelling
mistakes pumped into the Ask search engine. In exchange, K-Com gets a cut
of advertising revenues from the results.

The firm's technical support workers are telling customers that the
"service" is only a trial. If they query the redirects, unhappy business
and consumer users are told they can opt-out and given alternative DNS
server details.

The trial began on 17 March. It intercepts domain queries that are
non-existent in Karoo's own cache.

snip