All Your Domain Names Are Belong To Us

Rather worryingly VeriSign, the company that runs the .com and .net TLDs has assign a wild card to the A record of the .com and .net DNS zones.

This returns IP address 64.94.110.11, which resolves to sitefinder.verisign.com.

This means that any non-existant .com or .net domain now technically exists. If you mistype your domain, you could find yourself automatically redirected to VeriSign's holding and search page. It also makes it a pain to check if a domain really does exist or not.

VeriSign will no doubt suddenly get a large number of page impressions to this site, and will start to monetise it selling their services or third party advertising.

There is some documentation on Verisign's site finder, if you are interested in how it works exactly. To see it in action, just type some rubbish into your browsers address bar and add .com to the end of it.

All your domain names are belong to VeriSign! (to paraphrase the old saying).