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Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

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Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#211

Post by buuuuuut »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #206
elliotbnvl wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

verb: keep from being seen; conceal. In what way is what he’s describing not obscurity?

Yes that is what the word obscure means. But the phrase “security through obscurity” is an industry term that refers to keeping things secure purely by not letting people know they exist. In contrast with encryption, where I can tell you exactly where the encrypted data is, but you can’t access it. Security through obscurity is hiding a bicycle in a bush and hoping no one notices it, encryption is more like locking i…

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Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#213

Post by buuuuuut »

DrammBA wrote: post #205
elliotbnvl wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

verb: keep from being seen; conceal. In what way is what he’s describing not obscurity?

In every way, because context matters, and the original commenter intentionally recontextualized it just to be contrarian.

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Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#214

Post by bob1029 »

TZubiri wrote: post #143
yatralalala wrote: post #139

Hi, our company does this basically "as-a-service". The options how to find it are basically limitless. Best source is probably Certificate Transparency project as others suggested. But it does not end there, some other things that we do are things like internet crawl, domain bruteforcing on wildcard dns, dangling vhosts identification, default certs on servers (connect to IP on 443 and get default cert) and many oth…

"Security by obscurity does not work" This is one of those false voyeur OS internet tennets designed to get people to publish their stuff. Obscurity is a fine strategy, if you don't post your source that's good. If you post your source, that's a risk. The fact that you can't rely on that security measure is just a basic security tennet that applies to everything: don't rely on a single security measure, use redundant…

Obscurity can be fantastic.

One of my favorite patterns for sending large files around is to drop them in a public blob storage bucket with a type 4 guid as the name. No consumer needs to authenticate or sign in. They just need to know the resource name. After a period of time the files can be automatically expired to minimize the impact of URL sharing/stealing.

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#215

Post by itscrush »

> I am using CloudFlare for my DNS.

Based on this it sounds like you exposed your resource and advertised it for others. Reverse dns, get IP, scan IP.

Probably simpler, you exposed resource on IPV4 publicly, if it exists, it'll be scanned. There's probably 100s of companies scanning entire 0.0.0.0/0 space at all times.

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#216

Post by ewmiller »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #201
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what that phrase means. That's not even what the word "obscure" means. Obscurity is trying to not draw attention to something, or keep it hidden (as in "nobody knows that it's there", not "you know that it's there but can't access it"). Encryption doesn't obscure data unless you're stretching the definition of the word beyond its useful purpose.

verb: keep from being seen; conceal. In what way is what he’s describing not obscurity?

You wouldn’t call a room behind a locked door “obscured.” Even if it’s technically correct in the most stretched definition (which I’m not convinced of), either way it’s not how people actually use the word.

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#217

Post by throwway120385 »

natebc wrote: post #186
legitster wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Security by obscurity does not work" Depends on the context and exposure. Sometimes a key under a rock is perfectly fine. I used to work for a security company that REALLY oversold security risks to sell products. The idea that someone was going to wardrive through your suburban neighborhood with a networked cluster of GPUs to crack your AES keys and run a MITM attack for web traffic is honestly pretty far fetched…

Realistically we get into $3 wrench territory pretty quickly too.

They could also just cut and tip both ends of the Ethernet cable I have running between my house and my outbuilding too. I probably wouldn't notice if I'm asleep.

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#218

Post by zeagle »

yatralalala wrote: post #183
zeagle wrote: post #181

Can I ask an adjacent question? I have a bunh of DNS A name entries for locallyaccessedservice.mydomain.tld point to my 10.0.0.x NAS's nginx reverse proxy so I can use HTTPS and DNS to access them locally and via Tailscale. My cert is for *.domain.tld. It's nothing critical and only accessible within my LAN, but is there any reason I shouldn't be doing this from a security point of view? I guess someone could phish t…

As always, depends on your threat model. Generally having private IPs in public DNS is not great, because potential attacker gets "a general idea" how your private net looks like. But I'd say there's no issue if everything else is secured properly.

Great thank you. I've mulled around running separate reverse proxies for public and internal services instead.

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#219

Post by morellt »

sl1ckback wrote: post #173
yatralalala wrote: post #139

Hi, our company does this basically "as-a-service". The options how to find it are basically limitless. Best source is probably Certificate Transparency project as others suggested. But it does not end there, some other things that we do are things like internet crawl, domain bruteforcing on wildcard dns, dangling vhosts identification, default certs on servers (connect to IP on 443 and get default cert) and many oth…

[flagged]

Semantics. Considering this is your first comment ever and your account was made an hour ago I'll assume this is ragebait

Re: Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

#220

Post by eat »

DNS enumeration (brute force) with a good wordlist, zone transfer, or leaking the name through a certificate served when accessing your host via IP address are all possibilities.

The name "userfileupload" is far from not-obvious, so that would be my guess.

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