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Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

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131–140 of 310 posts

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#131

One strategy tip: don't play cat and mouse. As you've demonstrated, if you change one thing, they will figure it out and change one thing. Not only does that not work, but you are training them that it's worth trying to beat your latest change. Instead, plot a few different changes and throw them in all at once. Preferably in a way where they will have to solve all of the changes at the same time to figure out what h…

> pure IP blocks are easier to detect than tarpitting and returning fake/corrupted content

I recently had to employ such a strategy against some extremely aggressive card testers (criminals with lists of stolen credit cards who automate stuffing card info into a donation form to test which cards are still working). Instead of blocking their IPs, I started feeding them randomly generated false responses with a statistically accurate "success" rate. They ran tens of thousands of card tests over many days, and 99% of the data they collected was bogus. It amuses me to know that I polluted their data and wasted so much of their time and effort. Jerks.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#132
post #27

1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script. 2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains. 3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website…

These are the best ideas, especially SEO poisoning and alternate images. If their point is to steal content and rankings then poisoning the well should discourage this in the future. I suspect their actual goal is to have a low-effort high SEO site to abuse as a watering hole for phishing attacks.

As a side note, their domain is linked in this thread so they are seeing HN in their access logs and probably reading this. It should make for an interesting arms race. Or red/blue team event.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#134
post #71

Same thing happened to me and my service ( https://next-episode.net ) almost 2 years ago. I wrote a HN post about it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105890 , but to spare you all the irrelevant details and digging in the comments for updates - here is what worked for me - you can block all their IPs, even though they may have A LOT and can change them on each call: 1) I prepared a fake URL that no leg…

Makes me wonder if you could switch serving content based on the URLs. So they redirect back to your website. Or display images marked as copyrighted.

I tried but couldn't redirect back to my website as they stripped / rewrote all JS.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#135
post #71

Same thing happened to me and my service ( https://next-episode.net ) almost 2 years ago. I wrote a HN post about it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105890 , but to spare you all the irrelevant details and digging in the comments for updates - here is what worked for me - you can block all their IPs, even though they may have A LOT and can change them on each call: 1) I prepared a fake URL that no leg…

Side note: great idea for a website. This could be really helpful. You got a new user here.

I have to agree, my SO has been looking for something like this for a long time. Signing up today!

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#136
post #27

1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script. 2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains. 3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website…

Shadow nefarious techniques are the best. Don't give them clear indications that there is a problem.

For example, I had an app developer start stealing API content, so once I determined points to key from them, instead of blocking them I simply randomized the API content details returned to their user's apps.

Hey, API calls look good, the app looks like it is working, no problem right? Well, the users of the app were pissed and the negative reviews rolled in. It was glorious.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my search for this I found @document isn't super supported [0] I suggested something like: a[href*= "sukuns.us.to"] { display:none; } Then use SRI to enforce that CSS. [0]: https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_at-rules_document

How about something like... body[href*= " "] { background-image: url("http://goatse..."); } Ala: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011

Or just make the whole page rotate

    body[href*= ""] {
      animation: rotation 20s infinite linear;
    }

    @keyframes rotation {
      from {
        transform: rotate(0deg);
      }
      to {
        transform: rotate(359deg);
      }
    }

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#138
HN probably won't like this but if they are blocking all JS you can make all content invisible with CSS and use JS to unhide it before page load finishes. Temporarily of course until these guys go away.

The nice thing about this is it can be made arbitrarily complex. For example you can make the page actually blank and fetch all the normal, real content with JS after validating the user's browser as much as you like on both client and server. That's what Cloudflare's bot shield stuff does. Since JS is Turing complete there is no shortcut that the proxy can take to avoid running your real JS if you obfuscate it enough. They would have to solve the halting problem.

What a determined adversary would do is run your code in a sandbox that spoofs the URL, so then your job becomes detecting the sandbox. But it's unlikely they would escalate to this point when there are so many other sites on the internet to copy.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#139
post #41
post #27

1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script. 2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains. 3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website…

I like how you think. These are all great ideas! Reminds me of a time some real estate website hotlinked a ton of images from my website. After I asked them to stop and they ignored me I added an nginx rewrite rule to send them a bunch of pictures of houses that were on fire. For some reason they stopped using my website as their image host after that.

Is the primary motivator to do this?

I'm curious if they are stealing anything else, e.g. are they selling ads/tracking, do they replace order forms with their own...

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#140
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, constructed the honeypot URL using the proxy site and called it (thousands of times) so I can get them to fetch it from my server through their IP so I can log it.

Also for (2), any worries that your own providers might imagine you're trying to mount some half-baked DOS campaign?

Wasn't really worried about that.

I didn't do it as a super quick burst, but in a space of multiple hours.

First because the proxy servers were super slow and second - I couldn't automate it - their servers had some kind of bot detection which would catch me calling the URLs through script.

Instead, I installed a browser extension which would automatically reload a browser tab after specified timeout (I've set it to 10 sec or something) and I opened like 50 tabs of the honeypot URL and left it there to reload for hours ...

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