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eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

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Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#51

Post by dndvr »

wongarsu wrote: post #48
dndvr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the websockets angle is a bit of a red herring? Ebay will have your IP from your request so they can run nmap against your machine from their server without your browser ever knowing about it. I also know of a bank that does similar via an old school sort of way, their online banking login page tries to load images from urls made up of your IP and various ports. Presumably these are targeting known ports for o…

Websockets bring them past the router and any other hardware firewall or NAT. Also various software only listens to localhost, on the assumption that local traffic is trustworthy. They could still portscan from afar and it would still be sketchy, but using Websockets makes it worse

So does using websockets allow you to scan local IP ranges and find other devices on the LAN?

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#52

Post by [deleted] »

hazz99 wrote: post #31
moooo99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

irrc, eBay uses websocket connections [0] to scan the ports. Firefox doesn't offer an option to disable websockets in the about:config page. However, I have read about workarounds by setting network.websocket.max-connections=0 This is a global setting and is applied to all websites. I also wasn't able to test this myself yet. Are there any good extensions for blocking websockets on for specific domains? [0] https://n…

To people reading this, many websites rely on websockets for real-time information. They would likely fallback to per-refresh HTTP requests, but it also may break a bunch of sites.

[deleted]

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#53

Post by matz1 »

kburman wrote: post #16
mobilio wrote: post #14

It's crystal clear why they do this. Many companies or persons share their desktops for remote usage. Later they sell this service to eBay users. And they're using it for different fraudulent activities - from making real sales (just for stars) to bidding to own items (for rising price). For years eBay fight this.

They should find a better way instead of compromising privacy of all the users. And even if they decided don't they have any responsibility to tell the users.

I don't think they shouldn't, most people don't think this is an issue. I certainly don't.

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#54

Post by Nightshaxx »

I saw him talk about how Threat Matrix is usually blocked.....but Threat Matrix has their clients get unique endpoint URLs to disguise it. I don't really know how AdBlock works, but aside from the extra time it would take, why doesn't adblockers look up the record of any URLs on the page and see if they are a CNAME for an A url that is on the block list?

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#56

Post by nerdbaggy »

antoinealb wrote: post #24
eraserj wrote: post #15

Just wait until the database of ip and open ports is leaked and hackers start exploiting vulnerabilities of softwares listening to these ports to break into random people devices.

I don't understand the issue you are describing. You can already scan the entire ipv4 space for cheap with tools like zmap[0]. How does a premade list help ? In addition, I would expect such a DB to go stale very quickly. [0] https://zmap.io/

What is the legality of scanning large subsets that you don’t control?

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#58

Post by syshum »

varjag wrote: post #30
kevsim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like eBay wants it both ways. They want to have a huge user base with low friction to get started, but they also don't want fraudulent players. Instead of doing KYC (know your customer) like many financial services, they're stuck doing dirty tricks like this to try and combat fraud.

Cheating is rampant in all financial services that mediate transactions between end customers. No shortage of stories about card fraud or PayPal woes.

That is largely down to the liablity being on the end points of the transaction not on the transport layer...

Either the consumer or the merchant bears the cost for fraud, rarely does paypal or the banks if they did the problem of identity fraud would be solved, and would not be called "identity theft"

Re: eBay is port scanning visitors to their website

#60

Post by Wowfunhappy »

scollet wrote: post #7
olliej wrote: post #4

wasn't this on the front page just a few days ago?

More than one discussion can be had.

I respectfully disagree in this case—the last story was too recent, and this one does not contain any significant new information, so we're likely to end up just rehashing the same points (and have so far, in my estimation).

Edit: But, thefreeman above just informed me there's actual new information in this article (which I originally hadn't read, because the comments here made me assume it was the same as the last story on HN). So, thanks!

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