[Techtalk] Verisign wildcard DNS hijacks .net and .com for advertising purposes

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 12:47, Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Mary wrote:
> 
> > Point your browser at http://dfgdfgsfdgd.net/ or
> > http://sfhjsjfhkshfjshdfjkhsdfhjsd.net/ or
> > http://www.fdjlfdjkfdskdsfhjdsfhjdshdsfjkl.com/
> > 
> > Those .net domains aren't registered... but they now point at a Verisign
> > webpage rather than not resolving. Verisign has decided to use
> > unregistered domains themselves.
> 
> Are you sure?
> 
> I get an error, Gateway Timeout from Mozilla.  What browser are you using?

That could just be because a portion of Australia's Internet traffic has
gone awry today and if you are routing from Perth via Sydney to
Verisign's servers using Optus for some portion, life is going to be
interesting. Optus (at least on the east coast) are having some
problems, particularly with respect to connecting to overseas sites.
It's causing lots of fun. :-(

The problem is not just web traffic related: just try running 'dig' on
any random .net address and you'll see that it resolves.

Malcolm