How do I prevent Frontier from hijacking my DNS requests?
If you're a fiber-optic service subscriber with Frontier, along with your regular broadband service, you also get free DNS hijacking. What does that even mean?
![How do I prevent Frontier from hijacking my DNS requests?](/content/images/size/w2000/2019/08/Frontier-DNS-Hijacking-Makes-Me-Sad.jpg)
If you're a fiber-optic service subscriber with Frontier, along with your regular broadband service, you also get free DNS hijacking. What does that even mean?
By default, if you look for a non-existant website like: https://omg.frontier.is.so.awesome.i.want.to.marry.it/
What you SHOULD see, is something similar to this (taken from the Mozilla Firefox browser):
![](https://nixytrix.com/content/images/2019/08/2019-08-23-11_43_16-Server-Not-Found-Anu.png)
But what you get by default with Frontier is non-standard behavior. Instead of telling you that the domain doesn't exist, they send you to their own search page: the "Frontier Communications Web Helper" which looks like this:
![](https://nixytrix.com/content/images/2019/08/2019-08-23-11_40_47-Search-Anu.png)
I see absolutely no reason to give the fine folks at Frontier any additional meta-data or ad revenue. Additionally, as a professional software engineer, I like things to behave the way they're supposed to.
I wanted to turn this off immediately. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to disable!
In the top-right area of the page, you should see a "Settings" link. Click it.
![](https://nixytrix.com/content/images/2019/08/2019-08-23-11_49_18-Search-Anu.png)
You should now see an option for "Search Guide Settings". It should currently be set to "On".
![](https://nixytrix.com/content/images/2019/08/2019-08-23-11_52_18-Search-Anu.png)
Click "Off" and click the "Save" button.
![](https://nixytrix.com/content/images/2019/08/2019-08-23-11_52_46-Search-Anu.png)
!! DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE "Save" BUTTON !!
Now your searches for non-existent sites and domains should behave normally.