Irelands largest ISP Eircom have been having some serious problems over the last few days resulting in users been sent to bogus/fake sites where possable spyware or malware could have been installed. It all started for me on sunday evening when it looked like my broadband connection had gone down as all webpages failed to load. However i found out that it was only the webpage part of the broadband connection that had gone down and not the entire line or network by noticed that i could games online with Valves Steam.
After some frustrating few says i searched for a possable cause as it seemed very strange that the web had gone down but not the connection. It turns out that it Was a DNS (the computers that transalte www.bbc.co.uk into an IP Address) problem eith eircoms servers and further searching revealed that they had been hacked with loads of people posting the same problems on the boards.ie messageboards;
The solution was to change the DNS server settings in your router configuration menu to those provided by opendns.org which are;
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
Sources for the Article:
Possible DNS Hack at Ireland’s Largest ISP
Eircom DNS Servers Compromised?
Eircoms response;
Update: Eircom has released an official announcement confirming the DNS problems. “Customers may have recently experienced delays in web browsing and may have been unable to access the Internet. In some cases, customers may have been redirected to incorrect websites,” it reads.
As far as details go, they remain scarce, the ISP only noting that, “This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers.” It is yet unclear if this refers to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, or something else.