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

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141–150 of 310 posts

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

#141

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

We're trying to punish the people running the proxy mirror, not the users who stumble upon them just trying to use the site

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

#142
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…

Might I suggest a spin on this: instead of blocking the IPs, consider serving up different content to those IPs.

You could make a page that shames their domain name for stealing content. You could make a redirect page that redirects people to your website. Or you could make a page with absolutely disgusting content. I think it would discourage them from playing the cat and mouse game with you and fixing it by getting new IPs.

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

#143
> They are stripping all JS

Are they now?

Add a `visibility: hidden` to random elements on the page, and show them with javascript.

OR

Are they removing _all_ js? Have you checked whether they remove `` ?

You can try to do script injection _into your own site_ to see if their mirroring software is smart enough to deal with all the different xss vectors.

Bonus points: if they remove your ` attribute, add a style like

body { display: none} body[onhover='the js code that they will remove'] {display: block}

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

#144
I tried to look up their site then realized I block "us.to" locally. Since you have their site linked in this thread they are likely seeing the HN thread as a referrer in their access logs and reading this. I expect this to turn into an ongoing battle as a result, but maybe this could be a fun learning exercise for everyone here.

The current IP 45.86.61.166 is likely a compromised host [1] which tells me you are dealing with one of the gangs that create watering holes for phishing attacks and plan to use your content to lure people in. They probably have several thousand compromised hosts to play with. Since others mentioned you could change the content on your site, I would suggest adding the EICAR string [2] throughout the proxied content as well so that people using anti-malware software might block it. They are probably parking multiple phishing sites on the same compromised hosts [3].

This would also be a game of whack-a-mole but if you can find a bunch of their watering hole sites and get the certificate fingerprints and domains into a text file, give them to ZeroSSL and see if they can mass revoke them. Not many browsers validate this but it might get another set of eyes on the gang abusing their free certs.

If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, you could automate scripting the gathering of the compromised proxy hosts they are using and submit the IP, server name, domain name to the hosting provider with the subject "Host: ${IP}, ${Hostname}, compromised for phishing watering hole attacks". Only do this if you can automate it as many server providers have so many of these complaints they end up in a low priority bucket. Use the abuse@, legal@ and security@ aliases for the hosting company along with whatever they have on their abuse contact page. Send these emails from a domain you do not care about as it will get flagged as spam.

Another option would be to draft a very easy to understand email that explains what is occurring and give that to Google and Bing. Even better would be if we could get the eyes of Tavis Ormandy from Google's vulnerability research team to think of ways to break this type of plagiarized content. Perhaps ping him on Twitter and see if he is up to the challenge of solving this in a generalized way to defeat the watering holes.

I can think of a few other things that would trip up their proxies but no point in mentioning it here since the attackers are reading this.

[1] - https://www.shodan.io/host/45.86.61.166

[2] - https://www.eicar.org/download-anti-malware-testfile/

[3] - https://urlscan.io/result/af93fb90-f676-4300-838f-adc5d16b47...

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

#145
Lots of good suggestions here, let me throw one more in the pot -- could you do an equivalent of a "ghost ban"?

Instead of blocking their IPs, detect if the traffic is coming from the abuser's IPs, and serve different content -- blank, irrelevant, offensive, copyright violations, etc.

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

#146
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

because I asked them to stop doing it, and they didn't. Technically they were stealing my bandwidth.

Also to teach them an important lesson about the internet.

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

#147

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…

HN contains multitudes, I love this response.

At the very least you collect info about their sophistication level; will they adapt to adversity or will the bail/move on?

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

#148
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.

Wow, hadn't seen this before. Awesome site!

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

#149

My networking knowledge isn't great, so apologies if this is wrong. But if it's not wrong, it could help. FIND THE IP FOR THE DOMAIN PS > ping sukuns.us.to Pinging sukuns.us.to [45.86.61.166] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 45.86.61.166: bytes=32 time=319ms TTL=39 ... REVERSE DNS TO FIND HOST https://dnschecker.org/ip-whois-lookup.php?query=45.86.61.166 Apparently it's "Dedipath". And that WHOIS lookup gives an abu…

This is not a bad idea, though i would guess that if these guys change IPs, then it will be annoying to spend your time sneding emails, etc. But, then i thought: why not automate this with some simple scripts? You have al;ready outlined your recipe, so simply automate the steps...But the more i thought of the automation around this, you need to be creful not to turn into a "spammer of sorts, constantly sending emails...certainly, you wouild be sending legitimate emails, but if they change their IPs more often, that might trigger your automatiomn more often, somewhat turning you into a mild "spammer", right? :-) I'm not suggesting you abandon your apporoach, but simply to remember to not overdo it with big scale of emails sent out. ;-)

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

#150
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.

They literally proxy your website? I thought they'd cache it... that makes more sense now in your statement that you hit their website with a specially formatted url. Since they pass that through to you you can filter on that. Also: since you say 4k-5k IPs... any of them from cloud providers? And specific location?

No cloud providers as far as I'm aware.

They were all from the same 4-5 ASN networks, all based in Russia.

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