Google on Saturday confirmed that most of the Turkish Internet service providers are intercepting its public DNS (Domain Name System) service by setting up masquerade DNS servers.
“We have received several credible reports and confirmed with our own research that Google’s Domain Name System (DNS) service has been intercepted by most Turkish ISPs,” wrote Steven Carstensen, a Google software engineer, in a blog post.
In the last few weeks, the Turkish government blocked access to social media services including Twitter on March 21 and YouTube last Thursday, claiming that the services posed a threat to the country’s national security.
According to reports Google’s public Domain Name System (DNS) service is being actively blocked in the country as it was found that Turkish citizens were able to restore their access to Twitter and YouTube by routing their traffic through Google’s DNS.
Turkish citizens were found setting their PCs and mobile devices to use Google public DNS IP addresses, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4., to access the social media services even after the ban.
Other IP addresses that were used by the people to bypass the blockade were BGPMon’s OpenDNS address 208.67.222.222 and Level 3’s addresses 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2.
Adding to the report, an Internet monitoring firm on Sunday said that the DNS service from Level 3 had also been hijacked.
