TE Data: Masters of DNS Hijacking

Back in Egypt for a quick family visit, I had the joy of reconnecting with my old frenemy: TE Data, the national ISP that never disappoints—at least in finding new ways to disappoint.

You’d think in 2025 we’d be past the era of DNS hijacking and transparent HTTP interception, but TE Data is proudly keeping the tradition alive.

The Offense

While debugging my Nginx Proxy Manager interface on my VPS (IP:81), I expected the usual admin panel. What I got instead was a charming redirect to:

https://megaplusredirection.tedata.net/VDSL-Redirection_100.html

Ah yes, the legendary Megaplus Redirection page. Possibly coded in 2009, last updated in IE6, and still as broken as ever.

How?

Despite DoH enabled in Firefox, TE Data somehow:

• Intercepted my raw IP HTTP request
• Injected a redirect
• Failed to serve anything usable
• Wasted my time

All while I was just trying to debug port 81 on my own VPS. Truly, cutting-edge sabotage.

Bandwidth Generosity

Let’s not forget the blazing speeds. On paper: “Up to 30 Mbps”. In reality: I’m running htop and speedtest in parallel to feel like I’m part of something big.

It’s like they throttle your packets individually, just to add that artisanal, handcrafted latency. Never to mention that you have to renew your plan every couple of days because the internet usage is not unlimited.

Workarounds

Here’s what worked:

• HTTPS on port 443: Because TLS makes MITM-ing a bit harder for them.
• SSH tunnel: Because nothing says “I trust my ISP” like rerouting traffic through three encrypted hops.

Final Thoughts

If you’re self-hosting anything while visiting Egypt, just assume you’re in read-only Internet mode. TE Data wants you to browse cached news and think HTTPS is a Western conspiracy.

So thank you, TE Data, for preserving the vintage Internet experience. DNS hijacking is the new retro.