Privacy Implications of using ISP issued Router? - eviltoast

I know this is an outrageously bad idea, I don’t need convincing. I am just looking for some more information and discussion on what exactly the exposure and surveillance risk is.

I’m asking both for my own education (I am still very green to networking), and to better explain to people in my life if and why they should care.

  1. Is it true that traffic can be tracked and logged by ISP through DNS lookups, as these routers are preconfigured to use their internal dns service?

  2. If this is changed (like base.dns.mullvad.net), how much does this actually mitigate the risk here?

  3. What about when a VPN (mullvad) is also being used at all times? Would it then be “overly paranoid” to fear this untrusted box all the traffic goes through?

I personally take a conservative approach to things like this and assume it’s an unacceptable risk, but I don’t really understand what the truth is.

Thank you in advance for your time and thoughts.

EDIT: I’m asking about US and US adjacent areas

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    1. Yes, kinda. So if you use the default DNS servers on your ISP provided modem than the DNS requests are likely forwarded to a sever controlled by the ISP. Now, something to keep in mind they can see you do a lookup of DuckDuckGo.com but they can not see what you are searching. HTTPS protects you there

    2. A little, by default a DNS request is performed in clear text, so some ISP may intercept those requests and redirect them to servers they control. Yes there have been reports of this with Verizon. Good news there are 2 technologies that you can use to protect yourself. They are DNS over TLS (DoT) or DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Many applications support one of those technologies to secure your DNS traffic.

    3. Using a host based VPN may protect you from ISP DNS snooping. Depends on how you configured it.