[mdlug] [Fwd: [opensuse-offtopic] Some ISPs are fiddling with your pages]

[Aaron Kulkis]

Dodgy unauthorised adulteration

By Egan Orion
<http://www.theinquirer.net/articles/flameAuthor/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/16/isps-altering-web-traffic>: 

Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 12:14 PM

*GRADUATE STUDENTS* at the University of Washington have found that some
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are meddling with the contents of web
pages in transit to their subscribers.

Their paper
<http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/security/web-tripwire/nsdi-2008.pdf>
(pdf), which is to be delivered Wednesday at the Usenix Symposium on
Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Francisco, outlines
that about one per cent of the web pages that the researchers tested had
been altered during transmission.

The authors document some alarming practices by some ISPs. They examined
the data flowing to about 50,000 computers and found that certain ISPs
were injecting adverts into web pages transmitted on their networks.
They also founs that some web browsing and ad-blocking software was
altering pages and creating security vulnerabilities at the same time.

Co-author and PhD student Charles Reis said, "The Web is a lot more wild
than we originally expected." µ


http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/16/isps-altering-web-traffic