Press

Some Internet Service Providers have apparently been hijacking the search traffic from customers typing keywords into Yahoo and Bing search engines, and now the backlash has begun. Instead of searching on their chosen search page, ISPs — using gear from a company called Paxfire — are reportedly routing the traffic to the ISP’s servers or to Paxfire’s servers and delivering search results that can generate money for firms selected by the ISP as well as the ISP itself. Now Paxfire has been hit with a class-action lawsuit and may face a Congressional inquiry.

A recent study shows that a single company is responsible for a number of small ISPs making extra money using nefarious search engine hijacks. The report was a joint effort by Peter Eckersley of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Christian Kreibich, Vern Paxson, and Nicholas Weaver of ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) of Berkeley, California.

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.

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?