Comodo DNS Blocks Ghacks
Imagine my surprise when Jojo mentioned that Comodo DNS was blocking ghacks.net, allegedly because it was a hacking / warez site that may offer illegal sharing of copyrighted software and media. Bogus claims obviously, which can hurt a website financially and irritate new and regular visitors.
I tried to get hold of Comodo to resolve the issue. First, I checked their forums to see if it was a general problem. Then, I looked under contact and found their support system. I created a support ticked and waited a good hour or so. After that I received an response, stating that "This site is parked, and doesn't carry any useful content. The only content it has is advertisement links. Comodo Secure DNS blocks such sites".
No mentioning of hacking or warez in the reply. Now Ghacks.net is a parked domain with nothing but advertisements. Great, I wonder what domain they did take a look at, definitely not mine as it is not a parked domain obviously. You would not be reading this otherwise.
So, I replied and after 12 hours, I'm still waiting for a response. To be honest, I have no idea how they can classify my site like this. I have a nagging feeling that some ******* webmasters or ****** of users have reported the site.
Brett notified me about the blocking of ghacks as well in an email. He mentioned that Comodo started blocking a large number of sites since yesterday, and believed that it was probably because of the name of the site.
It is weekend and it is likely that I won't get a response before Monday, if I get any at all. For the meantime, I suggest you either ignore the message, or switch to Open DNS, which is a free excellent service. Their DNS server IPs are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
Another alternative is Google DNS, which uses the DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
Are you a webmaster with similar problems? Or a user who noticed that other sites are not accessible as well? Share your findings in the comments.
Update: My third email to [email protected] was answered quickly, and Ghacks does not seem to be blocked anymore by Comodo.
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Hi Martin Brinkmann,
We host a website for a customer, and comodo has this website on a blacklist. Why is a mistery for us, other sitecheckers don’t have this problem. Getting removed from this blacklist or recieving more information turns out to be a problem. No one is available for comment. How did you get of the blacklist?
Regards,
Herman
I think this article has helped me a lot. I did contact Comodo as well.
I do not imagine I’ve ever seen any web site with this particular quite a few reviews about it!
Update:
Contacted Comodo because Nirsoft was also blocked by Comodo. They actually responded quickly asking more details. When I provided them more details (screenshots), they answered me:
Thanks for your mail.
This issue has forwarded to our developers and will get back to you shortly. If the site is genuine and not a phishing site our developers will will unblock it within 48 hours.
“To serve you better in the near future, Kindly provide your Valuable feedback to [email protected] ”
Regards
xxxxxxxxxx
Technical Support Team
Haha, they thought Nirsoft was a phishing site?
I believe there might be a bigger thing happening: TrendMicro is suddenly blocking all kinds of sites as well that were working fine before, calling them threats.
Yes, some are warez sites, but I’ve used them for years without problems.
I then saw this article, and started thinking there might be more to it than that: some concerted effort to ‘legally’ block warez sites, instead of taking them down? Choking off access through fear of virusses/malware/etc?
Yah, I got a response from Comodo, and guess what. They still think ghacks.net is a parked domain. That’s so annoying.
Hi Martin,
Thank you for your mail.
This is to inform you that Comodo Secure DNS blocks parked pages. Parked page is a page that has no information beyond advertisement links. I have checked the domain ghacks.net and found that the domain is parked. So the domain is blocked by Comodo Secure DNS.
For information on parked pages, please visit the given below link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_parking
Please let me know if you need any further support.
Hilarious! Did they reference a Wikipedia article?
What about this one about learning abilities…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_(disambiguation)
“Stupidity is the property a person, action or belief instantiates by virtue of having or being indicative of low intelligence or poor learning abilities.”
C’mon Comodo, you have to make all reasonable efforts!
Glad to see this hasn’t been happening to me only. Does anyone using rapidshare have any issues regarding invalid certificates?. I can’t tell if the issue is connected.
They are blocking Rapidshare as well.
Thank you.
Ouch!
Never figured Comodo would do something so stupid.
I’ve been using their products since they first went public, but this is just no excuse. Sad!!
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The Tran was completely wrong in saying that OpenDNS blocks Yahoo! Messenger. I use OpenDNS as my DNS servers and I use Messenger daily without issue. If you’re having issues with Messenger, I suggest you look elsewhere.
I just opened this post and DID NOT get the Comodo prompt.
So maybe someone there does work on weekends and is paying attention?
Jojo no it is still blocked. What apparently happens is that the “unblock” option is valid for the browsing session. As long as the browser is open, you won’t receive the same warning twice. If you close and reopen, it appears again.
It’s because of the “hacks” string in the domain name, isn’t it? :-)
BTW, just for fun…
http://securedns.comodo.com/main?FailureMode=9&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fsecuredns.comodo.com
:-)))
@Martin,
you share ghacks’ IP with deny.de and the other site seems to be “parked”. So Comodo doesn’t block your domain name. They block your IP 96.30.22.116. You ought to take a closer look into this issue.
Cheers
Martin, I meant deny.de which uses the same IP as ghacks.net.
And of course Comodo’s behavior is not acceptable. I’m with you.
Heinrich I know, but deny.de has no ads at all, so even if that would be the problem, it would not justify their classification as a warez site. So, it must be something else. Not sure what though.
Heinrich, which sites appear to be parked? And should not they be able to block on a per-domain basis and not per IP? I mean, do they block hundreds of domains on shared hosting if they think one site is bad? And even if they did block the IP, what’s with the bogus warez claim? I never did that and never will..
Hello, Martin
I’m browsing the site using Comodo Dragon, without any warning!
I’m guessing “fixed”? The other possibility would be “Comodo is really screwed up”?.
That would be nice, but I have not heard from Comodo yet, and I’m really to laze to switch to their DNS servers again just to see if the issue has been dealt with. Thanks for letting me know.
This is why there should always be an option to whitelist a site. Mistakes are more easily dealt with. Norton DNS recently blocked whole sourgeforge! I use DynDns because of whitelist option.
Keep this in mind if you write about WOT or similar service. They are actually worse since amateurs can make these decisions and even pros are not always that good at it. Also pretty dumb to dismiss a service because of a few/some errors but then again tell that to site admins involved… At least they must have an effective report/complain system in place. Also goes for AV-programs which can flag legit programs and not always care that much.
From a webmasters point of view, I really like the search at OpenDNS to find out if a website has been tagged by the system. And I agree, a whitelist is a must have, with all the false positives around.
It’s really very disappointing that companies like Comodo commits mistakes like this. When I read the reply that you got from them, I felt like they don’t even bother to check the URL properly.
People, use OpenDNS, I am very happy with it or better use the suggestion by Velociraptor: https://www.ghacks.net/2009/12/14/change-dns-servers-with-dns-jumper/
Ghacks is the best ethical tech blog and Comodo should apology for this mistake.
Thanks guys for your support. I’m pretty disappointed by their support so far. The first response was very quick, but probably because the support staff did not even bother to look at the right site. Funny that they enable a new feature on a Friday, when their support seems to be either non-existing or limited on weekends.
I have no experience of Comodo DNS – but if they’re blocking ghacks it hardly fills me with confidence about its performance in general. Especially if they deal with hour-to-hour problems on a week to week basis!
So I reckon I’ll pass on trying Comodo DNS, especially as Open DNS has always performed very well for me.
Comparing to Norton DNS and Sunbelts’s ClearCloud, the performance of Comodo’s DNS is very poor. I have tried it, but the next moment I leave it.
I absolutely LOVE their firewall. It’s a pity that they would try and block access to this site though, which is not only a knee-jerk reaction but terribly misguided. Such attempted censoring of the Internet seems like a great reason to never use their DNS service.
It’s pretty disappointing, really. You just keep doing what you do, Martin and company.
This is not the first time Comodo DNS is making a fool of itself. I switch sometimes from one DNS server to another (or combine them) but Comodo is never of the lot. When companies do this sort of mistake they should apologize publicly (twiiter, facebook, new york times)
Gosh, Comodo…. mama mia!
Bitorrent related web sites are blocked too.
Like utorrent oficial web site, for exemple.
Comodo goes in a wrong way.
lol –> http://securedns.comodo.com/main?FailureMode=9&FailedURI=http://comodo.com :)
oh well :)
To my surprise !!
But Google DNS is better than OpenDNS since OpenDNS blocks some services like Yahoo! Messenger and at times makes it hard to access some websites
They have mistaken it for http://ghacks.com/.
BTW, I wonder why you went for .NET and not .COM?
Kaushik, I thought so as well, but then, I would assume that they actually read the email messages and test the domains thoroughly. I’m not sure why I did pick .net, maybe the .com was already taken? It has been a long time ago, and back then I did not really think about it much. Today, I would love to have the com. But the guy wants 20k for it, that’s ridiculous.
2 words, “stupid” DNS
just two words, “stupid” DNS :D
Or jump another DNS simply
https://www.ghacks.net/2009/12/14/change-dns-servers-with-dns-jumper/
Empty head Comodo people, ghacks is the best site and does not contain any kind of illegal stuff. Stop making false assumption Comodo.
I can say for sure that Ghacks is one of the most principled,ethical and useful site,and probably a role model for tech blogs.Bill M blog is as good.both are perfect sites making others leave pirate practices and use excellent freewares.Which joker can say Ghacks is indulged in anything unethical or unlawful
Thanks Ruchir for the compliments. I still do not know why they have flagged my site ;)