By Graham K. Rogers

A number of users in Thailand this evening are reporting problems with sites being redirected to a forex site. DNS was put forward as a possible cause initially but soon dismissed. While, initially, there appeared to be no common factors, such as service or broadband link, it would appear from later (unconfirmed) reports that all those affected were either using a Mac or an iPhone.

I experienced the problem on both the Mac I have and the iPhone, but did not experience the redirects with the same pages when using the iPad. That may come later, of course.

Not all sites are affected, and at times the sites that produce a redirect, will work for a while, then revert to the erroneous page loading. Local expert, Dave Oliver, who was helping track the problem down, Tweeted that he doubted the cause was malware, but rather something targeting Safari/Mac queries on the network somewhere.

More on this as it appears.

Late Notes

• Despite the suggestion that this was Safari-related, one user did report seeing the same problem when using Chrome.
• This later seemed to have cleared up of its own accord, although I expect there was some behind the scenes activity.
• On the way, I cleared out history and cookies in Safari on the iPhone
• Almost an hour later and it still seems to be holding (fingers crossed).

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.