Your ISP May Be Messing With Your Internet Activity

Posted by Pile (14210 views) Add this story to MyYahoo Add this article to del.icio.us Submit article to Reddit Add story to Furl Add story to StumbleUpon [E-Mail link]


About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

In a paper, the researchers document some troubling practices. In July and August they tested data sent to about 50,000 computers and discovered that a small number of ISPs were injecting ads into Web pages on their networks. They also found that some Web browsing and ad-blocking software was actually making Web surfing more dangerous by introducing security vulnerabilities into pages.

The paper, which was co-written by a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, will be delivered at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Francisco.

To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit.

In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. "We're confirming some rumors that had been in the news last summer, that ISPs had been injecting these ads."

The service providers named by the researchers are generally small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector. An XO spokesman said that the company does not engage in this practice and that any ad-injection linked to its network is probably being done by a "downstream" service provider that is purchasing network capacity from XO.

Report (pdf)

 

1 Article displayed.

Pursuant to Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230), BSAlert is a user-contributed editorial web site and does not endorse any specific content, but merely acts as a "sounding board" for the online community. Any and all quoted material is referenced pursuant to "Fair Use" (17 U.S.C. § 107). Like any information resource, use your own judgement and seek out the facts and research and make informed choices.

Powered by Percleus (c) 2005-2047 - Content Management System

[Percleus 0.9.5] (c) 2005, PCS