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Google DNS servers suffer brief traffic hijack

45 points| lelf | 12 years ago |itnews.com.au | reply

32 comments

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[+] jfoster|12 years ago|reply
A few days prior to this Google App Engine apps that were using custom domains started redirecting to google.com for about 3 - 4 hours. (Google hasn't acknowledged that publicly yet, but did set a security flag on one of the issues on the appengine issue tracker)

https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...

Potentially related, perhaps?

[+] th0br0|12 years ago|reply
"internet performance metrics analyst firm Renesys" - now that's a long company type.
[+] orvtech|12 years ago|reply
Leaving politics and ideology aside, there are precedents to consider... back in 2012 Malaysia had a similar situation but the outage was wider and more pronounced.

A different precedent is the fact that phishing sites for social networks have been found on Venezuela's government-operated ISP servers not that long a go http://orvtech.com/en/general/gobierno-venezolano-elecciones...

[+] josteink|12 years ago|reply
Why anyone would use a DNS server hosted by an ad & tracking-company on another continent instead of just using the one provided to you by your ISP one hop away is beyond me.

In what bizarro world is that supposed to improve performance, security or anything?

[+] acdha|12 years ago|reply
See https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/ and in particular https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/performa... and https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#nxdomains.

You might have an ISP where they have professional DNS admins, significant failover and a massive deployment of local DNS caches in each neighborhood. Unfortunately, many people have ISPs where they have two servers for an entire timezone maintained by the owner's brother-in-law and, to the extent that they think of DNS at all, it's only for questions like “Can we sell advertising on NXDOMAIN replies?”

[+] pbhjpbhj|12 years ago|reply
I used a nameserver tester to compare my ISP's servers with Google and OpenDNS's. OpenDNS came out on top for me at that time and I was interested in their filtering ability too so I went with that.

IIRC it was https://code.google.com/p/namebench/ that I used for the speed comparison. Just using it now I see it does a comparison with the popular global DNS providers as well as optionally local providers - it also can test for censorship.

There are many DNS benchmarking tools; https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm looks quite good.

[+] majke|12 years ago|reply
> Why would anyone use a mail service hosted by an ad & tracking company?

How about: because it's better?

[+] rowyourboat|12 years ago|reply
Apparently I'm living in your bizarro world, because Google's DNS servers consistently outperform my home ISP's by a factor 2 or 3, spiking to 10, in terms of measured response time.

So yes, my ISP sucks.

[+] nyrina|12 years ago|reply
Because my ISP (TDC) has been ordered by the Danish court to DNS block certain websites, such as the pirate bay.
[+] ithkuil|12 years ago|reply
I don't think it's served from another continent. It's an anycast address and I guess it's served from many replicas with global coverage.
[+] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
I've found many ISP's to have terrible DNS servers. They update slowly, they might hijack requests, etc.
[+] VMG|12 years ago|reply
because I've had worse experiences with my ISPs
[+] bjerun|12 years ago|reply
I'm using 8.8.8.8. Does this mean I might have a problem now (virus or similar)?
[+] MertsA|12 years ago|reply
You wouldn't have been affected at all if you aren't in Brazil or Venezuela.