For the past week or so I was having random redirect issues. It was actually happening when I was checking this website (willstare.com). I finally had enough and did some scans on my PC. One of them scanned my HOSTS file and spit out a little nugget for me. Somehow I had an entry for pagead2.googlesyndication.com pointing toward 194.145.200.27. That was obviously not supposed to be there, so I did some digging to find out who that IP was.

It turns out it was a website based in the Netherlands called http://www.devianceprojects.com/. I still have no idea how that got there, but I will be more vigilant while cruising the web. I emailed the administrators for that site asking if they had any idea why that entry would be in  my hosts file, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. I will update this is I get any more information. I have included my hosts file below to show what it looked like.

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

194.145.200.27 pagead2.googlesyndication.com