Why am I randomly writing about DNS you will wonder when plenty of other people wrote about it many years ago? Yesterday randomly I typed in express.co.uk without the www and without the use of a search engine. I ended up at a completely random website: https://app-a702.mangahigh.com/en-gb/login - screenshot below.
I did some research and this website is not connected to the newspaper. To further ensure I was not imagining what happened, I tried it on a smartphone with/without Wi-Fi and within Internet Explorer & Firefox - the same result.
Take my domain name and most others, you add a A @ record and www record. One does www. and the other works if you don’t type in www. Below is a short snippet of what the express.co.uk has setup.
To many this article and the above will appear as gobbledygook. 52.48.114.28 is the middle A record entry and it goes to Mangahigh if you visit the IP address. 52.48.114.28 is very likely their @ entry which handles non www visits. All the IPs are Amazon AWS Ireland registered.
52.48.114.28 is a IP address used by another company and Express.co.uk is linked to it. Perhaps AWS changed the IP address owned by mistake or Express.co.uk forgot to update their records. A simple weekly internal IT task would catch this from going on for too long.
To put it simply a tiny config change within their DNS means people who do not use search engines or type in express.co.uk not www.express.co.uk end up at a random education site - Mangahigh are the winners here since they are getting free traffic by mistake.
Newspaper notified and awaiting a response.