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Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#71

Post by karel-3d »

mrtksn wrote: post #46
edarchis wrote: post #10

Visa application is riddled with scams. From the simple website that charges you twice the price to websites that will tell you that you were rejected and then fake your documents to get in with your name. So they're probably trying to see that you're not one of those web servers, a proxy for them or detect some known C2 channels.

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a n…

As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#72

Post by mrtksn »

paganel wrote: post #65
mrtksn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a n…

The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.

Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued.

The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ).

Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#73

Post by privacyking »

asimovDev wrote: post #5

Embarrassed to say that I wasn't aware of this practice. Are there malicious uses for this beyond fingerprinting?

Yes. Facebook was using this trick on Android. Meta's android apps would host a server on localhost, and their sites would communicate with this local server to pass tracking information that would otherwise be blocked by all browser protection methods on Android. I guess it is still fingerprinting, but at the most extreme end.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#74

Post by SnuffBox »

kolla wrote: post #4

My biggest grief with that site is that it's like something from the 90s.

>like something from the 90s

It looks useful and looks good, there's minimal unneeded whitespace and I'm glad it looks as it does. We'd be better off if the entire web switched to a style like this.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#75

Post by SnuffBox »

bhaney wrote: post #12
kolla wrote: post #4

My biggest grief with that site is that it's like something from the 90s.

As something from the 90s myself, I find this rude.

It's also inaccurate, as this style of page (relating to layout and specific graphic style) didn't appear until 2006ish.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#76

Post by SnuffBox »

jansper39 wrote: post #59
kolla wrote: post #4

My biggest grief with that site is that it's like something from the 90s.

These guys need to look at Gov.uk, this site is a total horror show.

I wish gov.uk was even a smidgen as "outdated" looking as that page.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#77

Post by hoherd »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #58
M95D wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no ideea. Possibly that's a limitation of Chrome+Firefox developer tools (I get the feeling it's the same code)? But I found what "burp" is: https://portswigger.net/burp/communitydownload

This is what I see. https://i.imgur.com/lvjg2YQ.png

> 400_random_url_with_numbers_403

That looks so much like test code that was shipped to prod.

Searches for that string on GH does return results.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#78

Post by rat9988 »

mrtksn wrote: post #72
paganel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.

Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that…

You are looking at it from Turkish perspective unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#79

Post by dns_snek »

junon wrote: post #51
dns_snek wrote: post #40

The "port scan" just seems to be a local connection to 127.0.0.1:8888. I don't know what purpose it serves on this page, but our government websites often use this technique to communicate with native software for digitally signing documents. Are you seeing connection attempts to other IPs?

Might also be card readers, debug servers, etc. Could also be incompetence :D until I fixed it, deploying from my local machine rather than CD resulted in one of the baked in URLs being localhost rather than the public host on the project I'm working on now. Their local development server might just be at port 8888. Wouldn't surprise me.

I looked at the website again and noticed that the request paths looked odd, one of them being `/400_random_url_with_numbers_403`. I googled that and it looks like it's part of a client-side bot detection script that's testing something, the explanation isn't very informative.

https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794

> These requests are caused by the bot profile to test the different browser capabilities.

> 'http://127.0.0.1:xxxx' request is a call to the localhost/client machine, which is normal when trying to protect assets like end-server using ant-bot defense. It does not have any impact regarding application page load.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#80

Post by teknopaul »

paganel wrote: post #65
mrtksn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a n…

The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.

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