Some DNS lookups failing intermittently when 'Malicious Website Protection' is enabled

[bdg2]

Having had weird problems with intermittent failure to collect email on my Windows 7 (64 bit) PC from one of my POP3 accounts for quite a while I was delighted to discover today that the cure was to disable 'Malicious Website Protection' in MalwareBytes Anti Malware 2.1.8.1057.

 

When the problem is present even DNS lookup on the server fails with a timeout.

 

I think the problem might be triggered by the unsually large result of a DNS lookup for the domain name in question and/or by the fact that my DNS server returns IPv6 results as well as IPv4 results.

 

Here is the result of nslookup when it is working right:

C:\>

C:\>nslookup outlook.office365.com

Server:  dd-wrt

Address:  192.168.11.1

 

Non-authoritative answer:

Name:    outlook-emeawest.office365.com

Addresses:  2a01:111:f400:8800::2

          2a01:111:f400:8829::2

          2a01:111:f400:9850::2

          2a01:111:f400:5096::2

          2a01:111:f400:8028::2

          2a01:111:f400:5174::2

          2a01:111:f400:9428::2

          2a01:111:f400:503c::2

          132.245.194.242

          132.245.196.34

          132.245.212.98

          132.245.27.34

          132.245.228.2

          132.245.229.130

          132.245.226.34

          132.245.195.162

Aliases:  outlook.office365.com

          lb.geo.office365.com

          outlook.office365.com.g.office365.com

 

 

C:\>

 

My router at 192.168.11.1 is set to use OpenDNS at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

[lmacri]

Hi bdg2:

 

I don't know if our problems are related, but I have a similar problem connecting to the backend Symantec servers to update my Norton Internet Security antivirus software or run Norton file reputation (Download Insight) scans when Malicious Website Protection is enabled - see the trace route failures posted in my thread Norton Pulse Updates Fail When Malicious Website Protection Enabled.

 

On 28-May-2015 I was told by Malwarebytes Customer Support that "it looks like we may have some additional incidents with other users with similar symptoms" and that the problem might be related to my location (Canada). They haven't responded to any of my e-mails since then so I wiped the Premium version of MBAM v2.1.8 off my system and am currently using the free version of MBAM as an on-demand scanner.
-------------
32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox 39.0 * NIS 2014 v. 21.7.0.11 * MBAM Premium 2.1.8
HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

[bdg2]

More information:

After rebooting everything works okay for a few hours.

I've just discovered that switching Malicious Website Protection off and on again has worked as a fix too.

[bdg2]

Hi bdg2:

 

I don't know if our problems are related, but I have a similar problem connecting to the backend Symantec servers to update my Norton Internet Security antivirus software or run Norton file reputation (Download Insight) scans when Malicious Website Protection is enabled - see the trace route failures posted in my thread Norton Pulse Updates Fail When Malicious Website Protection Enabled.

 

On 28-May-2015 I was told by Malwarebytes Customer Support that "it looks like we may have some additional incidents with other users with similar symptoms" and that the problem might be related to my location (Canada). They haven't responded to any of my e-mails since then so I wiped the Premium version of MBAM v2.1.8 off my system and am currently using the free version of MBAM as an on-demand scanner.

-------------

32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox 39.0 * NIS 2014 v. 21.7.0.11 * MBAM Premium 2.1.8

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

Could be.

Whatever it is it doesn't seem simple, it's not going to be easy to find a way to reliably reproduce it.

Why don't programmers ever just spend a day or two reading though their code looking for mistakes any more?

Nonbody will investigate bugs unless they can be reliably reproduced :-(

[bdg2]

I've done a clean and re-install as detailed here:

https://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?/topic/122284-mbam-clean-removal-process/

and it's fixed at the moment.

But I'm ready now if it does it again.