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All your Web typos are belong to usNetwork administrators are fuming about changes made by domain registrar Verisign to the DNS system yesterday amid concern that the alterations could make it difficult for mail servers to reject mail from invalid domains.
Resolving Everything: VeriSign Adds WildcardsAs of a little while ago, VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity.
In another words, Verisign diverts the traffic from the DNS errors to their own use. For example, broken links checker like Xenu won't see broken links anymore. Try a few non-existent domains, such as these bellow, and you will end up at sitefinder.verisign.com:
· www.afsdaafsdaafsda.com
· www.verisignreallysucks.com
· www.foofoofoo.com
As a quick fix I added two new entries to my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 64.94.110.11
127.0.0.1 sitefinder.verisign.com
And yes, any mail that comes from 64.94.110.11 is most likely spam.
:: Sasha, at 05:33 pm on Tuesday, 16. September 2003
Unfortunately, the suggested change to hosts doesn't work, at least on 98SE. While it does block attempts to access the site by name, it doesn't block the pages generated by VeriSlime, since it only checks HOSTS to determine whether or not it should resolve a name. It doesn't secondarily check HOSTS after you have resolved a name.
I suspect BIND-PE will have a fix for this, and recommend it for other purposes, such as if you have an ISP with flaky DNS servers. Needless to say, Unix users have better options already.
:: Rob Clark, at 05:36 am on Friday, 19. September 2003
Useless scrawling facts:
Top 5 scrawlers:
(updated once a day)
556 Sasha
488 zoka
316 vitez-koja
235 Davor
58 mungos
