Paxfire stole Google.com

POSTED BY joe on Aug 7 under Security

Seriously. Stolen… or at least, that’s certainly what it looks like if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck using a Paxfire DNS appliance like the two I found a few weeks ago.

I just finished my first Google Knol: DNS Squatting

In a nutshell, Paxfire DNS appliances pretend to be ‘www.google.com’. They aren’t pretending to be other search engines from what I can tell - just Google. Fun times when the marketing wonks decide to sniff your search habits…

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2 Comments so far
  1. your mom October 14, 2008 4:59 pm

    This was caused by a dns failure, probably just a hiccup in the network, or just a failed query to your dns server. They should probably cache a number of well-known domains and not touch them, but I think Paxfire tries to be as hands off as possible. Anyways, don’t blame paxfire, blame your isp. Your isp almost certainly already sniffs your queries anyways, they are the reason sites like quantcast.com exist. Paxfire is just the mercenary hired to “deliver the message” of dns failure, and then monetize it.

  2. joe October 15, 2008 8:57 pm

    It wasn’t a DNS failure.

    And blame my ISP?

    Perhaps you should re-read the article. I am the ISP.

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