…Clueless

The last time I reported, Airtel Broadband was redirecting the erroneous traffic to a partnered website (onspeedsearch) where they displayed advertisements.

Just five minutes back, I noticed that erroneous traffic is now being redirected to a page hosted by OpenDNS. Now, I have no clue if Airtel has in some way partnered with OpenDNS to monetize this kind of traffic.

Another theory that is currently running through my brain is that maybe Airtel is redirecting its customers to the OpenDNS servers. This could be because of the recently disclosed vulnerability by Dan Kaminsky which makes all DNS servers prone to attacks. OpenDNS has already stated that it’s servers are patched. What I feel is that Airtel is unable to patch it’s own DNS servers at this point of time so they redirected their customers to OpenDNS. Obviously, there is no way to verify this and obviously this means that OpenDNS is the party that is profiting here.

I am still using the same DNS servers as mentioned in my previous post but this time I am redirected to :

http://guide.opendns.com/?url=badbadurl.in

badbadurl.in is used as an example here.

More discussion about this can be found at IBF.

Airtel has started redirecting traffic from dead links, non-existant domains and typos to a website of its own where it displays advertisements and a search box surrounded by some categories.

The search box is just a dummy form element because if you type in another term it yields no result. Airtel is in partnership with a website called onspeedsearch.com for this and a quick search on Google revealed that many other ISPs have also partnered with onspeedsearch to display advertisements for erroneous traffic on their networks.

Here’s a screenshot of the said redirected page :

The DNS currently in use are :

• 202.56.215.55
• 202.56.215.54

Seems Airtel is trying to earn from it’s customers’ mistakes. Sweet.

Update : For further discussion on this subject, check out this thread on IBF.