Yahoo link gets redirected to localhost

Question

I just started to come across an issue with a windows 7 machine that I have

In an email from Yahoo I get a link back to a story like

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/protestors-behind-occupy-wall-street-want-133222625.html;_ylc=X3oDMTBtNWkzYTNpBF9TAwRlbWFpbElkAzEzMTc4NDg2MjQ-?bcmt_s=e

Although the text of the link is something nice like "Story about wallstreet protester"

But when I click on the link, or cut and paste it into a browser (IE9 or Firefox 6.0.2) it redirects me to

http://localhost/blogs/lookout/protestors-behind-occupy-wall-street-want-133222625.html?_cacheable=1&bcmt_s=e

If I to go to

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/protestors-behind-occupy-wall-street-want-133222625.html

It gets redirected to the correct site.

This just started happening this week. I am currently running IIS7.5

Update 1 Checked the host file and all that is in there is

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#   127.0.0.1       localhost
#   ::1             localhost

Answer 1

Since it is a redirection and not a mis-resolution, the most plausible explanation is that the communication partner of your Windows client is simply sending an appropriate response to redirect to localhost. You should check the response headers and the response content with either a packet sniffer like Wireshark or using a Browser Add-on like ieHTTPHeaders for Internet Explorer or Live HTTP Headers for Firefox. You could add the results to your question for a further analysis.

The communication partner is not necessarily news.yahoo.com (although it is possible that something at Yahoo is/was temporarily broken), but might also be an explicitly set or transparent HTTP proxy. Another thing to test would be simply using another browser - Internet Explorer (or rather the underlying API) does have a number of hooks which would allow an alteration of the browser's behavior - some malware programs are known to exploit this.

Answer 2

You should check your HOST file.

%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Check if yahoo or its ip address is set to redirect to Localhost