[FPSPACE] FPSPACE Digest, Vol 43, Issue 11

[robot at esper.com]

following up on the post from David Harland - 

The problem with spaceflightnow.com appears to have been fixed. At
least, I could not replicate it.

The phrase I was looking for yesterday was "domain poisoning". This
is a problem which exists at the provider level, not with the
registrar nor the owner nor the host of a domain. Basically, certain
large providers -- usually cable companies in my limited experience
-- have misconfigured domain name servers, usually with MS'
Enterprise o/s installed with stupid defaults. The flaw allows bad
actors to pollute the lookup tables with bogus pointers. 

FOr example, on June 14, the Central Florida Astronomy Society
(www.cfas.org) experienced this problem through some nogoodnik
apparently exploiting a security hole at Comcast. They were routing
users to 64.74.223.198 which is a known nasty advertising site. If
you Google this IP address you will see lotsa other complaints from
other organizations like sports clubs, etc. Or Google the phrase
"domain poisoning".
 
One way to fix the problem: 
an individual user (assuming Win XP) must:
- go to the Control Panel;
- click Network connections;
- change from automatically lookup DNS to lookup using
[205.152.37.23] (which should be a good lookup location for Comcast
users). Other users will have to call their providers to get that
suggested good IP address.


From: David M Harland <dave.harland at ntlworld.com>
>The excellent space news website
>http://www.spaceflightnow.com/
>seems to have been hijacked by a
>souvenir vendor...


Robert G Kennedy III, PE
www.ultimax.com