Blog of Nuke

I came across a report (PDF)by researchers at the University of Washington that indicates some ISPs are injecting their own advertisements into web traffic bound for users’ computers. Most of the culprits were small ISPs but some large ISPs like XO Communications in the U.S. were implicated. XO states that it’s a downstream service provider purchasing network capacity from them that’s responsible. (wTwNjzVFVU)

PC World has an article on the matter. (You can read it here.) What’s notable in the PC World article is the mention of some client-side applications, designed to modify web page code for the purpose for security and privacy issues, actually injected security vulnerabilities into the pages they processed.

University of Washington has a web integrity checker you can access but make sure you turn off anything client-side that modifies web pages on its own such as ad and script blockers, code filtering/modification applications like Greasemonkey etc.

While less than 1% of ISPs were found to be doing this during the study, it’s extremely important to protect net neutrality, the security and integrity of web sites and address this issue early to increase consumer awareness.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 6:06 am and is filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.