The hosts file is very important to windows because it maps domains to ips. So I could actually point google.com in my hosts and send myself to the ip of yahoo.

The hosts file is very important to windows because it maps domains to ips. So I could actually point google.com in my hosts and send myself to the ip of yahoo.com. The key observation here is that the REAL hosts file was hidden, and a hosts file that only looked like a hosts file (with a different kind of o) was the non hidden one.