Charter screwing with DNS

posted May 12th 2008 10:30pm by Eliot Phillips
filed under: misc hacks

Charter Communications seems to be pulling some sort of crap with their DNS servers. While working on a new project our friend Billy Hoffman, discovered that Charter was reporting absolutely every domain as resolving. They do offer a solution by providing an opt-out cookie, which isn’t useful at all if you’re not using a web browser… and I’m guessing most of Charter’s subscribers aren’t looking for a bastardized version of the net. We’ve seen recently that messing with DNS like this can actually open up new security holes.

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Comments [31]

tagged: billyhoffman, charter, chartercommunications, dns, hoffman, memstreams

Reader Comments

Their ’search’ redirection was bad enough. I make sure to tell all my friends (the few that don’t know any better) to set manual DNS on their routers to OpenDNS.

Posted at 11:14 pm on May 12th, 2008 by AndrewNeo

No news to me, I noticed this roughly six months ago here in mid Michigan. Soon as a saw the first redirect, I changed my router’s DNS servers. Problem solved.

Posted at 11:16 pm on May 12th, 2008 by Tuckie

The opt-out is absolutely useless. If you’re using anything but a web browser, it doesn’t do anything. Their f-ed up system screwed up our VPN. We have internal (web and non-web) servers that suddenly became unreachable for our users because their primary DNS was resolving to the damn search page instead of falling back to the VPNs DNS and finding the internal server. It broke mail, internal web sites, etc all broke. It took about 2 days to figure out why. F you charter.

Posted at 11:43 pm on May 12th, 2008 by Empty Jay

I’m on charter. I actually talked to one of there tech people once, and they said DHCP servers on my trunk where faulty. It took them a day to fix it.

I’ve had problems with them a lot over the years, but they’re the cheapest provider here over 1Mbps. I get digital phone, 5Mbps internet, and a decent TV(which I never watch) channel selection for a low price I won’t solicit. They also have 10Mbps internet.

Posted at 11:46 pm on May 12th, 2008 by TJHooker

i cant **STAND** charter!!! I have charter and it’s been a pain in the rear since day one. flaky connection, slooow, screwy customer support (half their representatives don’t know the DNS server numbers). I wish we could just get DSL here, but, for some strange reason, we’re “out of range”…even though we’re **right in the middle of the friggin city** !!! and what’s worse is they neglected to tell us that until *AFTER* we signed a one year contract. we had to PAY to CANCEL our service and switch back to clumsy ol’ charter!! i **HATE** ISPs! with a PASSION!!!

Posted at 11:59 pm on May 12th, 2008 by andrew

color picture!! burns teh eyes.

Posted at 12:05 am on May 13th, 2008 by tjhow

simple solution is to go OpenDNS and then turn off the typo correction. This knocks out their “Guide” page and should give you back your non resolution errors.

NOTE: Have not tried this. I use OpenDNS but have left the typo correction on. Stupid clumsy “cmo” goes back to “com” which is nice.

Posted at 12:11 am on May 13th, 2008 by Hal Hockersmith

I actually like charter. I have the 10Mbps connection and its one of the fastest around here. No matter who is my ISP I always use OpenDNS.

Posted at 12:18 am on May 13th, 2008 by Stephen

Charter is an evil company. They have the worst service of any company with which I’ve ever had to do business; even worse than fast food restaurants. When I cancel my service with them, they sent my account to collections for not returning a cable box. The thing is: I never had a cable box. Ever. This kind of crap coming from them does not surprise me in the least.

Posted at 12:32 am on May 13th, 2008 by Matthew

As a painfully honest charter field service tech, I can honestly say I’m not surprised by this. In fact, I’ve seen and dealt with it for months in our area, and routinely suggested/shown customers how to use opendns instead. Upper management is know for making less than intelligent decisions, usually only affecting us poor saps internally though. Customer support is painful even to us field techs sometimes, but thankfully there are the select that know what’s going on.

Posted at 1:58 am on May 13th, 2008 by cabler_elf

And why not use the root nameservers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/root_nameserver

Posted at 3:33 am on May 13th, 2008 by akejoda_868

This is nothing new; Time-Warner Cable does exactly the same thing.

Posted at 7:54 am on May 13th, 2008 by MooglyGuy

@akejoda_868

1. Because you lose the benefit of cached entires that are less hops away. So lookups are slower.
2. It would not be polite to the root servers for everyone to start doing that. It would be like asking the CEO of a company every dumb little question you have when some low level supervisor could do it for you. There is a chain of command you should follow. If everyone starts wasting the time of the CEO (maybe board of directors would be better since its distributed) there starts to be a break down farther down the chain.

Just use OpenDNS.

Posted at 8:25 am on May 13th, 2008 by ryan

@ryan:

I agree with point #1 (closer dns cache = faster lookups)
However, re: #2; to continue your analogy, that only works as long as the low-level supervisor isn’t *lying* to you – which is what charter is doing here. Rather than say “we don’t know the answer (to that URL lookup)”, they are basically saying, “Yep, we know it, that (URL) is right here!”

If I go to a supermarket and ask a stock clerk where the coconuts are, his answer better be one of these: (a) We don’t have any; (b) I don’t know; or (c) Right over there. And (c) had damn well better be coconuts, and not some overripe watermelons (or “male enhancement” product) they’re trying to get rid of!

Posted at 8:46 am on May 13th, 2008 by rwl

I am new to Charter (about a month). I thought that it was odd that half of the “internet” worked. Running some tracert’s were really interesting. DNS problems make complete sense. I guess opendns it is. Hopefully, that will fix some of the connectivity problems…

Posted at 8:47 am on May 13th, 2008 by Annoyed

yeah, we HAD charter about 2 years ago, but they were doing some crap (just in our erea) and then they screwed stuff up so bad that they had to sell their servers around here, so then suddenlink bought them (thinking I guess they could fix them) eventually they got fed up with what ever the hell Charter did and sold to Jetbroadband, whom have thankfully fixed almost every problem, and our internet is like 3 times faster than it ever was!!! :) sorry ’bout you guy’s problems though…

Posted at 9:32 am on May 13th, 2008 by spiderobert

I don’t mind Charter, since they do have one of the most open and insecure networks. I love modem hacking :-)

Posted at 9:52 am on May 13th, 2008 by longbow486

This has come up in the past on other sites too. Verizon has been doing it for a while it seems (link below to a discussion on the matter) and Time Warner has been doing it for at least the last year. Time Warner also offers an opt out that at least works for web browsing and ping, but I haven’t explored past that much really. Their response when I wrote them regarding the “broken” nature of the DNS was (as I recall) more or less “We offer an opt out, so deal with it”. I’d really love to have a viable option to switch to for internet, but I’m not seeing much out there and bullshit like this is quickly getting to me.

Link to discussion on Verizon’s actions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/02/20/7806912.aspx

Posted at 10:02 am on May 13th, 2008 by Blind

@ryan, re: #2

Yeah, it’s like that, except that the root servers actually know the answer. ;)

Posted at 10:21 am on May 13th, 2008 by ivan256

I’m glad I’ve got Qwest ISP!!!

Posted at 10:39 am on May 13th, 2008 by Mike

Charter “communications” sucks azz. They have been pulling this **** for quite some time in my area. And it only is worse with windows if you are trying to VPN to work because of the farked up retarded way that windows does dns resolution order. So when I am trying to resolve a machine at work, charter intercepts the farcking request and gives their dumb freakin “I think you are lost, child. Come into my gingerbread house of paid for advertisers so I can pillage your pockets” instead of simply saying, “umm .. I don’t know” so the DNS res can move on to the next interface so I can get my FREAKIN WORK DONE so I have more time to read Hack-A-Day!!!

Posted at 11:15 am on May 13th, 2008 by buzzkill

Good call on OpenDNS, I don’t why I didn’t think of that before.

Posted at 12:00 pm on May 13th, 2008 by DietFig

http://www.opendns.com/features/guide/

Since open DNS does the same thing, does it’s op out work across the board or no?

Posted at 1:07 pm on May 13th, 2008 by Blind

opendns ???

Thats not a solution, its just an equivalent problem. Try changing your dns lookup servers per their instructions.

Now from a command prompt try: nslookup asdf.asdf.asdf

TADA everything resolves to their servers.

Now in a browser try http://asdf.asdf.asdf

TADA you get a page with ads! YAY so much better than the EXACT same problem on charter

Posted at 2:30 pm on May 13th, 2008 by ralph

I think openDNS only does that for http(s) requests. Normal stuff like your scripts should get the expected failure.

Posted at 3:01 pm on May 13th, 2008 by Jonathon

OpenDNS is not an automatic fix. If you get your google on, you will find that in some areas they intercept port 53 traffic and route to their own. Also, opendns is slow as hell.

Posted at 3:13 pm on May 13th, 2008 by buzzkill

Charter are not alone on this one.
TalkTalk Broadband in the UK do the same thing, we discovered this ourselves whilst trying to connect people using TalkTalk broadband onto our VPN as it totally f**ks up VPN users.
We suspected its a supposedly ‘friendly’ feature which forwards people on to TalkTalks ‘nicer’ looking helper page than your typical ‘page not found’ error in IE, as every page would be DNS redirected to the nicer one. Totally unfriendly in reality when you try to do anything out of the ordinary-
Its actually a Windows VPN client oddity – ISP DNS lookups are still performed whilst connected to the VPN (to Microsoft ISA server at least), arguably normal behaviour.
So its important for ISP DNSs to fail unresolvable lookups normally, so that they are instead failed thru to the VPN provided DNS (our internal DNS servers). That way, staff can resolve addresses internal to our network (not exposed on the internet).
Either way, without this oddity, it just wouldn’t be an issue. Typical MS really.

Posted at 5:07 pm on May 13th, 2008 by Stuart

Thanks for the opendns recommendation, guys.

Posted at 9:10 pm on May 13th, 2008 by Blake

Can someone get me the password to this email account? sonicx@charter.net
and send it to
hugdealer@hotmail.com

It’s ok if it’s impossible to thanks.

Posted at 11:52 pm on May 28th, 2008 by Tyler

Embarq is doing this in Vegas. Made it a MAJOR pain in the ass searching for a server on our local network as anything you would ping would return an IP address. (figured on what was going on after a couple of minutes) This is messed up!!! All in the name of hijacking bad page requests to get more revenue from their subscribers.

Posted at 2:56 am on Jul 2nd, 2008 by Matt

I don’t think open dns fixes this situation. Charter recently began prozxying all dns requests no matter which dns resolvers you specify. Quite annoying, working for a dns company grom home, this sucks.

Posted at 9:04 am on Sep 7th, 2008 by Dan

Charter screwing with DNS

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