nanog mailing list archives

Re: "Big Red"


From: Scott Francis <scott () virtualis com>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 22:54:58 -0700

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 04:20:59PM -0700, Tim Langdell, PhD exclaimed:

Has anyone heard of "bigred.com"? A client has suddenly discovered that all
of its browser queries that do not resolve (www.rubbishcharacters.com for
e.g.) get diverted to the BigRed search engine web site. No one in the
company is aware of having installed anything that could have intentionally
have caused this effect for DNS failures. Anyone got any ideas what is going
on here? Is it a known problem? Viral or otherwise?

One of my friends had the same problem on her PC at home. Found out that she
had installed some 'browser enhancement' software that made a considerable
number of well-hidden registry entries changing everything from her default
home page to her search engine results to ads displayed in the browser's title
bar (MSIE 5). Took quite a bit of digging about with regedit.exe to get rid of
the bugger.

T.L.

-- 
Scott Francis                scott@ [work:] v i r t u a l i s . c o m
Systems Analyst          darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t
West Coast Network Ops                           GPG keyid 0xCB33CCA7
               illum oportet crescere me autem minui

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