Streamyx forced ads (202.71.99.194)

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Streamyx forced ads

A couple of days back, I was at my in-laws doing some browsing on their PC. Now my in-laws have a Windows XP laptop, that isn’t secured, which is fine because as far as I can tell, I’m the only one that uses it. Most of them now go to their phones or tablets for internet access–nobody uses PCs anymore!!

But I noticed something strange. I wasn’t able to access Amazon, which was where I was browsing for some Christmas shopping (but not logging in of course). Somehow every time I typed www.amazon.com on the browser, it would re-direct me to a Lazada advert. Now this looks like a piece of malware—sounds like a piece of malware–but after some investigations, I discovered this WASN’T a piece of malware.

Instead I realized that this was a problem with the streamyx DNS. For some reason all the traffic that should have been routed to Amazon, was being routed to a TM IP address at 202.71.99.194. A quick Google search led me to this lowyat post, and this one,  post from 2013–so this wasn’t new. TM was routing all unresolvable domain names to adverts that looked so much like malware, it’s indistinguishable from a malware infection.

TM was doing exactly what malware authors do!!

I would never have encountered this problem, because I use Open DNS–but this is unacceptable from TM. To deploy something, that behaves and acts like a piece of malware, just so they can force feed you some adverts isn’t just unethical and bad ISP practice–it’s terrible security.

Because when you deploy something that looks and acts like malware–but isn’t. Then people get de-sensitized to malware infections and soon ignore malware infections, thinking it’s legitimate shit done by their ISP.

TM should fix this–and really should stop this nonsense.

It’s now a good a time as any to change your DNS settings so you’re not susceptible to this Malware look-alike.

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