Defaulting back to Google.co.th... what's up?

[old_expat]

Recrawled a site today to add sitemap then tried to get to my webmaster tools page. When I click on the link, google.com/webmaster .. not only does it default to google.co.th, but I get a popup as well.

When on the .co.th screen and click "go to google.com" .. it defaults to .co.th

Yesterday it was fine.

*pounding head against wall*

[tedster]

The pop-up is really strange - it's not happening for me and seems like a very "un-google" thing. That makes me immediately wonder about malware on your computer.

My first inclination would be to dump google cookies (or at least turn off cookies) and see if that corrects the issue.

[old_expat]

It turns out that one particular ISP (Maxnet) here in Thailand did indeed hijack google.com and redirected their users to .co.th. .. which also had a popup window advertisement.

Apparently, all http directories were affected .. but none of the sub-domains. The hack was finally taken off after a number of hours (12?) .. and after many complaints.

I just wonder if Google will take any punitive action and if so what it might be. Lots of discussion about it on local forums.

Apparently, the hack involved a number of sites .. another being Hotmail.

Things were back to normal this morning.

[tedster]

Thanks for that report, expat - I was just reading about that very issue. While researching it, I came across a dedicated Google page for reporting IP address problems to Google that I had never found before.

[google.com...]

Could be quite handy for those times when Google's geo-location goes wrong for you.

[giggle]

Funny enough old_expat I was reading about that on ThaiVisa today.

[Asia_Expat]

It's Maxnet themselves hijacking the connection, routing you through their servers, forcing the pop up (advertising a Maxnet promotion) and then sending you on to Google.co.th... and as they're targeting Thai users, they're too stupid to think people like us would notice when we can't get google.com

Unbelievably stupid move by Maxnet. They got a very venomous telephone call from me last night.

[old_expat]

@giggle .. yes, that's a pretty involved thread (ThaiVisa) with some pretty detailed technical explanations.

@Asia_Expat .. yes, purely Maxnet's silly stunt. The folks on True and TOT didn't see any of it.

I believe the main gripe is that any google.com/folder/ triggered the popup. The several subdomain.google.com I tried were not affected.

I hope Google slaps them around a bit for pulling such a stunt. Googleguy needs to make a trip to BKK. ;)

[Asia_Expat]

You know as well as I do that nothing will happen on the legal side. The law is meaningless here. Even though it was a clear manipulation of our connection, they will just claim a technical fault and it will get buried. The only reason the popups stopped so quickly was the volume of customer complaint.