Modifying hosts for Sucuri or DNS bypass
Sometimes it’s necessary to bypass the public DNS or Sucuri Firewall to directly access a web site.
When a computer makes a request to the Internet to access a site, a DNS (Domain Name Service) call is initiated to find the IP address matching the host name in the URL. Every computer has a file called “hosts” that is looked at before making the DNS call. So to bypass DNS lookups, we want to edit the hosts file with the information we want.
To do this, the “hosts” file on the local computer needs to be updated with the site name and IP address of the site.
Changing your hosts file on Windows
- Open your favorite text editor (notepad, notepad++, etc)
- Navigate to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
- Open the file called “hosts”
- Add an entry at the bottom that looks like: 34.66.18.216 www.akoyabio.com
- Then Save.
Windows won’t let you save to the same folder, so you may need to save to your desktop and then copy to \windows\system32\drivers\etc. Note: Notepad++ will ask you to run in Administrator mode when it runs into this problem. If you allow it to, it could replace the file without having to save it to the desktop and copy it over. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/
Also, there is no file extension at the end of hosts. So if your editor saves it as hosts.txt, then it won’t work.
When you want to remove or comment out the line, repeat the steps above and then either insert a “#” sign in front of the IP and save or delete the line and save.
i.e. #34.66.18.216 www.akoyabio.com