Re: Web hijacking by router - a new method of advertisement by Belkin

["todd glassey" <todd.glassey () worldnet att net>]

William - there may be legal recourse here - What I think Belkin has just
done is provided precedent for anyone trying to beat any Online Case by
their saying "it was the router"...  and then the ISP would have to prove
that there was no problem in the routers and that they were not rewriting
the headers of the datagrams or packets under software control, either
intentionally or by some hacker attacking the Router and implementing a IOS
rule or replacement in the IOS OS environment.

Either way this is really bad news for Law Enforcement unless they react
quickly and put legislation in place to prevent anyone from rewriting a
request or misrepresenting the request address translation. In fact this may
already be covered under the Super DCMA laws in a couple of states because
the router or DNS lookup effectively changes the IP addresses from what they
"were intended to be"...

Just an amusing idea.

Todd

----- Original Message -----
From: <william () elan net>
To: <nanog () merit edu>
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 2:37 PM
Subject: Web hijacking by router - a new method of advertisement by Belkin


> I have just read this on the register and followed it up on usenet:
>    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/33858.html
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=BvSqb.24184%2
4jW5.427571%40twister.tampabay.rr.com&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3D
UTF-8%26group%3Dnews.admin.net-abuse.email
>
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c91e821d.0311051525.70aa9920%40posting.
google.com
> It seems folks at Belkin followed up on verisign concept and implemented
> web redirection for marketing purposes (web request hijacking) on the
> router itself. There they did not even bother about mispelled domains or
> bad requests and just decided that every 8 hours it would be ok to
> replace your original webrequest (from any computer connected through that
> router) with one going to their own server advertising their
product/service.
> How original of them! But for other router manufactures present on this
> list, make notice - DO NOT DO IT IN YOUR OWN PRODUCT EVER. I (and from
> newsgrousp there are appears to be many others with same opinion about it)
> do not want routers modifying my network packets without my knowledge
> about it and definetly not for marketing of your own products.
>
> In the mean time after this post, I'm off to datacenter room to look for
> any belkin products I can spot, after that follow up to Fry's would be
> necessary to buy replacements.
>
> --
> William Leibzon
> Elan Networks
> william () elan net