Has Sky started hijacking DNS requests to non Sky DNS servers?

[Captain Yolo]

Hi all,

We have Sky Broadband at our businesses' office, migrated from Be-there.

We have our custom router we've used for years, and we've got the OpenDNS servers set up on it so all devices in the office use their DNS servers for lookups.

However today I noticed that requests do not seem to be hitting OpenDNS's servers anymore, but seems to be going to Sky instead.

No configuration has been changed on either the router or any of our devices. When going to an invalid site, we should be redirected to www.website-unavailable.com, however this is not the case.

We also tried a website that Sky would block (just out of interest), and indeed, the 'Blocked by Sky' page appeared.


I've tried different DNS servers including Google's DNS servers, and servers from OpenNIC, both on the router and on the devices themselves, and we get the same results.

Doing NSlookups brings the correct hostnames for the DNS servers, so this makes me think Sky are doing some kind of Packet inspection, and sending any DNS packets to their own servers rather than the ones we specify.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Kind Regards,
Captain Yolo

[gymno]

That's all out of my league but there is some info here:
http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/sky-b...dns-calls.html

[Captain Yolo]

Hi Gymno,

Thanks for that, but I doubt Sky are caching stuff for servers like OpenNICs.



Kind Regards,

[Saturday]

However today I noticed that requests do not seem to be hitting OpenDNS's servers anymore, but seems to be going to Sky instead.

OpenDNS provides a test page. What does https://store.opendns.com/settings/home-free/ report?

If I set my DNS to OpenDNS I get "Success! You're now using OpenDNS" which would seem to indicate that I'm now using OpenDNS. However, if I then try to navigate to an invalid site I don't get www.website-unavailable.com. If I deliberately navigate to that page then there is a link which indicates that OpenDNS redirection ceased on the 6th June: see A new reason to love OpenDNS: no more ads or redirections which states that "As of June 6th, all of OpenDNS’s users will get NXDOMAIN and SERVFAIL messages to get truly RFC compliant DNS".

So, nothing sinister by Sky as far as I can tell - just a recent change by OpenDNS.