…Clueless

I use AirTel as my ISP. Sometimes, I forget to add the domain suffix and prefix and just simply enter the name of the website. The AirTel DNS is intelligent and redirects me to the required website.

But something unusual happened today. I keyed in “facebook” in the address bar of my Opera browser and hit enter. I was redirected to facebook.in. At first, I didn’t notice anything strange and didn’t even look at the URL in the address bar. I simply put in my username and password and proceeded to login. But the login took forever.

I refreshed the page and this time I noticed something different. The username and password fields did not have their usual yellow borders, which show that you have the credentials stored in the Opera Wand password manager. This time I decided to look at the address bar and saw that I was on http://www.facebook.in and not on facebook.com

I did a quick whois for the domain. The information seemed pretty fake to me but the server it points to seems to be a legit facebook server. It shows up results when you search for friends but everything else on the website is broken. The results also seem to have been fetched from Facebook as the original Facebook uses “s.php” for fetching results whereas facebook.in uses “srch.php“.

So, I am not sure if this is a fake website or a legit one which is yet to be launched. As a precaution, I logged into Facebook and changed my password. I’ve emailed Facebook, lets see what they have to say about this. This intelligent feature of my ISP turned out to be a big security risk for me!

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