20 June 2022
Starting the 16th June 2022, Qurium received reports that users of Smart Broadband in the Philippines were not able to reach the independent media outlet Bulatlat.com.
The users’ browsers were returning errors related to failing DNS resolution.
Qurium looked into the logs of its DNS servers and recorded the last DNS request coming from Smart Broadband the 16th June at 6:24 UTC. After that time no more DNS requests were forwarded to Qurium’s servers and clients receive the error message “DNS Refused”.
Users of Smart Broadband that use the ISP’s DNS resolvers do not obtain a valid response from the operator for the domain bulatlat[.]com or any of its subdomains. By not providing DNS resolution, Smart Broadband is blocking the access to the website.
In order to confirm that the DNS resolution had been tampered by the operator, Qurium performed multiple DNS requests for bulatlat.com using other DNS resolvers (such as Google’s 8.8.8.8) and we always obtained a valid response.
DNS requests from Smart Broadband were normally coming from the prefix 121.54.70[.]0/24.