Verizon DNS Hijacks Nonexistent Domains
Verizon appears to be reintroducing a practice reminiscent of the old Site Finder scheme, intercepting DNS queries for certain nonexistent domains and returning a helper page instead of the proper error response. The redirected addresses resolve to vznassist.infospace.com, indicating a form of DNS wildcarding that can undermine standard domain resolution behavior.
A test query for foobar against a Verizon DNS server (68.238.128.12) returned a valid-looking answer with an IP address (66.150.2.134) rather than an NXDOMAIN status. This behavior breaks the intended semantics of the DNS protocol, potentially causing issues for network tools and applications that rely on proper error codes for nonexistent hosts.
The roll-out does not appear to be universal—users on FIOS have not experienced the same interception. As a temporary workaround, switching to Level 3's anycast DNS servers at 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 restores standard NXDOMAIN responses.
