You type the web address of a political website correctly in your browser but th

Question

You type the web address of a political website correctly in your browser but the web content you see contains political messages highly critical of the candidate that owns the website, messages the candidate would never permit on his site. You call your friend who uses a different internet service provider and she tells you that when she access the same website, she sees only the expected content, none of the critical content you see. Assuming that no malicious changes have been made to your system, which of the following is the most likely explanation for these different views of the same website?

a) A DNS cache poisoning attack has been successfully perpetrated against your local name server but not that of your friend.

b) The authoritative DNS server for the website's domain has been hacked.

c) A DDOS attack against the website is underway.

d) Your session has been hijacked

Explanation / Answer

Answer is A)

Explanation: Let's look at each of the 4 options in detail.

1. DNS cache poisoning: It means that the DNS records that are locally stored in your router or system has been compromised and modified by some attacker. So, even though the web address is correct, your poisoned DNS cache is telling you that the website exists on a server where it doesn't. Infact, the server that the DNS cache is telling you to visit is a malicious server containing critical content.

So, this is the correct option.

2. Authorative DNS server of website's domain has been hacked: If this were true, then your friend would have most likely seen the critical content also (assuming that the friend doesn't already have the correct address in her DNS cache). So, this option is not very probable.

3. DDOS attack: This would make it difficult for the website to service the requests. So, webpage may not respond or open promptly. However, this doens't modify content. So, this option is invalid for this case.

4. Your session is hijacked: If this is true, then someone else might be able to disguise as if they are you. But it won't affect your own browsing. So, this option is also invalid for this case.

Hence, answer is (a) DNS cache poisoning attack.

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