SpyBot Blocks CasaleMedia

Sometimes software does the darndest things…and it can drive you crazy. That’s just what happened today when I attempted to login to my publisher account at CasaleMedia.com. Oddly, enough my requests to the website were being redirected to the webserver running on my personal computer. Being a Windows XP box, I issued the following command to bring up the hosts file:

C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\etc\HOSTS

Much to my surprise, I found a HUGE list of sites added by SpyBot Search & Destroy with casalemedia being one of them. They are redirecting these sites to the computer owner’s PC as a means of blocking them. I’m not sure why Casale was added to that list but here’s a small excerpt:

127.0.0.1   www.casalemedia.com
127.0.0.1   casalemedia.com
127.0.0.1   www.cashdeluxe.net
127.0.0.1   cashdeluxe.net
127.0.0.1   www.cashengines.com
127.0.0.1   cashengines.com
127.0.0.1   cashsearch.biz
127.0.0.1   www.cashsurfers.com
127.0.0.1   cashsurfers.com
127.0.0.1   www.CashUnlim.com