TimeWarner Hijacks DNS Servers

The best offense is a good DDoS Defense

July 23, 2007 - TimeWarner is taking action against botnets. The company recently hijacked the Domain Name Service (DNS) servers of certain Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels including those of EFNet. Any user going to ns1.sd.cox.net was redirected to a custom channel that executed a list of commands set to find and clean drones from their client's computers. Certain sources stated that TimeWarner's actions were illegal because they involved hijacking DNS servers, redirecting the users without notification and accessing a personal computer without the owner's direct consent.

TimeWarner claims that cleaning spyware and malware from their customer's computers helps to limit spam and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Malware-free computers are much less likely to be used as zombies in a DDoS attacks. However, the question remains: Was this a legal tactic? Some say that hijacking a DNS server and modifying something on a client computer without direct permission is illegal. Others say that deleting malware is a very good action, but the means of carrying it out were at least questionable and the concern is that the same strategy could be applied to other types of files and data such as .mp3s.

Source: Slashdot

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