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Found hooked up to my router

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Re: Found hooked up to my router

#32

If someone would ship this to our office with a note like "attach this to a LAN port" chances are it will get attached. And we're a software house. People tend to pay attention to viruses, etc.. but not physical security.

previously, the "pwn plug": https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=pwn...

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#34
post #6

Strangely, Reddit cut off comment on the topic, before the device was clearly identified.

Yeah, I have no idea how it could accomplish what is alleged. Just lots of very bad no good end of world comments. Have none of these people ever used public wifi?

Have none of these people ever used public wifi?

This situation is totally totally unlike public wifi!

When I connect to public wifi, the attack surface into my laptop is the external interface of the latest MacOS, with firewall on. Perhaps there are exploits against that, but they're not common. The Mac does have pf, but I'm sure it's a way out of date version! :)

OTOH, "this thing" on the inside of a router/firewall has complete unrestricted access to the LAN. At my house I have (and I just checked) 35 active IPs behind my firewall. It's not hard to get to that number for 4 people: iPhones, TiVos, laptops, desktops, access points, printers, gaming consoles.

I confess I don't secure my LAN computers very well. I have, e.g. 3 letter passwords. That's simply to keep my kids from accidentally going where they shouldn't be.

I'm not alone in my lax security. I do occasionally peruse exit traffic and check firewall logs, which probably puts me somewhere in the most secure 1% of "typical" households.

And even if I were totally paranoid, what can I do about the Internet of shit? Am I supposed to strictly segment everything? At what point does prudence and caution drift into paranoia?

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#35
post #6

Strangely, Reddit cut off comment on the topic, before the device was clearly identified.

Looks like a nano pi neo: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Of course, but that tells you nothing. What software is in it?

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#36
Interesting that it is "worth" $15/month. Maybe they were never going to pay up. But if they were, that seems expensive when they could just use compromised PCs and devices for ... whatever they are going to do? Plus they had to buy and supply the dongle.

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#37
post #27

Besides malicious intends and security disasters. These mini-servers could be used for all kind of cool decentralized "self-hosted" services.

a completely legitimate and valuable network engineering resource is run by RIPE using small devices running openwrt:

https://atlas.ripe.net/landing/probes-and-anchors/

a RIPE atlas probe is a small tp-link device that needs a LAN port on your network and USB power. It forms a vpn back to RIPE, and uses traffic outbound via the default gateway it gets via DHCP to reports metrics like uptime, latency to various destinations on the internet, what its external IP is outside your NAT, what ASN it's on, whether your ASN is having reachability issues to the "whole" internet, etc.

many medium and large sized ISPs host RIPE probes at different geographic locations in their networks.

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#38

Interesting that it is "worth" $15/month. Maybe they were never going to pay up. But if they were, that seems expensive when they could just use compromised PCs and devices for ... whatever they are going to do? Plus they had to buy and supply the dongle.

yah, this needs a deeper analysis. hopefully some researcher reaches out to him to do real forensics.

Re: Found hooked up to my router

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies out there that offer proxies from 'real' US resident IP addresses. I think these companies use tactics like this to be able to offer real residential IPs (and not IP ranges belonging to hosting companies) This is the first one that came up on google - https://stormproxies.com/ - I'm not saying that specific company is in any way related to this device or tactic (it is just the first on google for…

Luminati.io merely uses the Hola extension to power a massive residential IP network. Hardware is so 2000.

This is honestly a pretty neat idea. Don't get me wrong, it's sketchy as hell and I'm sure gets abused, but residential proxies... well played.
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