itemnotfound.com

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Firefox
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ojintoad
Posts: 60
Joined: November 9th, 2003, 12:43 pm

itemnotfound.com

Post by ojintoad »

I have recently been infected with... well... something. itemnotfound.com somehow manages to replace my default google I'm feeling lucky search from the address bar in Firefox with their own proprietary search system. I'm not sure how they do it... It's not hard to remove. Resetting cookies doesn't work, but deleting the cache does seem to. I'm not sure which page I obviously visit on a regular occurance that infects me.

The domain page doesn't actually have a web site. The only thing that seems to work is wwwv.itemnotfound.com/search?qo=<querystring>&rn=<some>

Their domain is registered through godaddy with some sort of proxy registration service, so I have no idea who the actual backing company is. I tried to get myself reinfected to investigate to no-avail.

What concerns me is that they take over such a specific Firefox function, that is, the I'm feeling lucky search. They don't actually change the preference (when I go and look at the about:config while infect nothing has changed, AFAICT). I know this is somewhat offtopic but since it infects such a specific function I was wondering if anyone could offer insight on how they manage to override it without changing the config.

I am using Firefox on Windows.

If anyone else has ever been infected please feel free to contact me. Thanks.
"I'm just making sense here" - Olly
supergirl260
Posts: 2465
Joined: September 10th, 2005, 6:32 pm

Post by supergirl260 »

sounds like something has hijacked your windows host file
Camden
Posts: 2
Joined: October 9th, 2006, 4:34 pm

Post by Camden »

I also have Cavalier (actually Phonom, which appears to be the same company). I reported this issue and they replied:

-------------

We have set up a new service on our DNS servers for our customers to protect them on the internet. To keep them from going to possible “off color”, or “bad” search engines, we have set it up so if a customer just types walmart in the address bar, it brings up, itemnotfound.com, it used to allow a search page with other options like to get to walmart. This is to keep their computers from hitting sites that may contain virues, spyware, or any other type of off color items.
Camden
Posts: 2
Joined: October 9th, 2006, 4:34 pm

Post by Camden »

By the way, I have replied to Cavalier:

---------------

Thank you for this information. If you permit me to ask... does Cavalier have a financial interest in, or receive any compensation from, the owners of itemnotfound.com in exchange for this service? I ask this because it seems that itemnotfound.com features advertisements and targeted links, which seem to indicate that it is a for-profit enterprise. If you are not able to answer this question, please forward it to the appropriate area of your company.
breakall
Posts: 2
Joined: July 7th, 2004, 5:59 am
Location: USA-VA

Post by breakall »

Camden, I'm glad I found your post. I can second what you've reported here. I am also a Cavalier Telephone DSL customer and recently noticed this redirection. After looking up how to change the default location bar search engine in Firefox, I found that it was correctly configured to use Google, yet I was still getting "itemnotfound.com".

Have you had any response from Cavtel on this?
aledawg
Posts: 1
Joined: October 19th, 2006, 10:29 pm

Post by aledawg »

breakall wrote:Camden, I'm glad I found your post. I can second what you've reported here. I am also a Cavalier Telephone DSL customer and recently noticed this redirection. After looking up how to change the default location bar search engine in Firefox, I found that it was correctly configured to use Google, yet I was still getting "itemnotfound.com".

Have you had any response from Cavtel on this?


Hi!

I also have CavTel and have found this same, very annoying thing. I was able to find that if you look at the bottom of the page for the "About" link, it gives you an Opt Out choice. How very generous of them...

BUT - Once I got rid of that, now I'm stuck with MSN Search. No matter what I do, it seems, for IE or FF alike, I am always redirected to this new Live.com search function in stead of my Google... VERRRRRRY ANNOYING. Does anyone know what to do?

Thanks,

E
barretj
Posts: 1
Joined: April 13th, 2007, 9:17 pm

Post by barretj »

One solution is to use another dns service. I am currently using my university's dns, unfortunately it is like 19 hops away when I do a traceroute (whereas the cavtel dns is only 2 hops), and since almost every connection to a host on the internet requires a hostname resolution, things are generally slower this way, although not very noticeably. If you don't have a university or employer who's dns you can make use of, you could try opendns (www.opendns.com). I have no idea how good this service is, I just came across it while searching around for alternatives to cavtel's dns. When I tried it, I found out that they also have a similar "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder">site finder</a>"-like service, but you can <a href="http://www.opendns.com/faq/#change_prefs">disable it</a> by registering a free account with them. I did not try creating an account with them, because my uni's dns is good enough for me, but you may want to try it.
supergirl260
Posts: 2465
Joined: September 10th, 2005, 6:32 pm

Post by supergirl260 »

old zmanzero
Posts: 0
Joined: December 31st, 1969, 5:00 pm

Post by old zmanzero »

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