Is EarthLink Now Hijacking Browsers?

For a moment there I was fuming at EarthLink. They are not my ISP and as far as I know I never downloaded anything from them. Yet the past few days if I mistyped any domain name in the address bar in both FireFox or IE I would end up on one of their landing error pages. (EarthLink DNS Error Page)

At first I just ignored it but then when I thought about it I just got pissed. I thought “Why in the hell is EarthLink on my machine and what right do they have to make money off of me with their own error pages?”

I ran virus scanning and adware tools to clean my machine. I searched my regedit for anything “EarthLink related” and apart from some email addresses on my machine and configuration files which had the words EarthLink in it, I could not find a thing.

I then wondered, had my laptop also been compromised?

After booting it up and opening up my browsers I saw what should be the default “Server Not Found” error page. So it was only my main workstation.

At this point I was fuming as I was trying to figure out all the tools and things I had downloaded over the past few weeks that could have possibly jacked my browsers. I went and disabled every possible thing. Opening and closing both browsers as I removed every little thing but still that EarthLink page kept on coming up for a mistyped domain.

Then, I took a break from it all and in doing so I thought about how I would create a tool that would allow me to hijack a browser without leaving a trace on any person’s machine.

I figured that this could be done a lot of ways but the one that I thought which would be the easiest would be via the ISP. Since my laptop worked and I knew that it was connecting to my wireless router, I figured my desktop must not have been connected to my network.

And as it turned out, my desktop defaulted to the wireless connection and once again it chose my neighbors over mine.

I thought – stupid wireless! My neighbor must be an EarthLink user.

I keep removing his router from my settings but for what ever reason his pops up and my computer loves to connect to it.

Short of the story is, the person doing the hijacking was me. Still this was such a waist of a few hours.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 2:08 pm and is filed under SEO / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.