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We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

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201–210 of 391 posts

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure there's plenty of PHP at Amazon and Facebook (just with slightly different names)

There is no PHP at Amazon (at least not 2009-2016). It was evaluated before my time there and Perl Mason was chosen instead to replace C++. A bunch if that’s still appears to exist (many paths that start with gp/) but a lot was being rebuilt in various internal Java frameworks. I know AWS had some rails apps that were being migrated to Java a decade ago, but I don’t think I ever encountered PHP (and I came in as a pr…

Ok, my "pretty sure" turns out to be "not sure at all". Thank you for the refresher! I was thinking about Mason and somehow conflated Perl with PHP.

I left Amazon 2020. Had various collaborations with ecommerce (mainly around fulfillment) and there was plenty of Mason around.

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#202
post #57

>The first bug that our retrospective found was CVE-2015-5243. This is a monster of a bug, in which the prolific phpWhois library simply executes data obtained from the WHOIS server via the PHP ‘eval’ function, allowing instant RCE from any malicious WHOIS server. I don't want to live on this planet anymore

As has been demonstrated many, many (many, many (many many many many many...)) times: there is no such thing as computer security. If you have data on a computer that is connected to the Internet, you should consider that data semi-public. If you put data on someone else's computer, you should consider that data fully public. Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the ac…

Do you use a bank account? Or do you still trade using only the shells you can carry in your arms? Perhaps networked computers are secure enough to be useful after all.

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#203
post #143
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been demonstrated many, many (many, many (many many many many many...)) times: there is no such thing as computer security. If you have data on a computer that is connected to the Internet, you should consider that data semi-public. If you put data on someone else's computer, you should consider that data fully public. Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the ac…

> Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars Well, no home is burglar-proof either. Just like with computer security, we define , often just implicitly, a threat model and then we decide which kind of security measures we use to protect our homes. But a determined burglar could still find a way in. And here we get to a classic security consideration: if the effort required to bre…

And I think there's some cognitive problem that prevents people from understanding that "the effort required to break your security" has been rapidly trending towards zero. This makes the equation effectively useless.

(Possibly even negative, when people go out and deliberately install apps that, by backdoor or by design, hoover up their data, etc. And when the mainstream OSes are disincentivized to prevent this because it's their business model too.)

There was a time, not very long ago, when I could just tcpdump my cable-modem interface and know what every single packet was. The occasional scan or probe stuck out like a sore thumb. Today I'd be drinking from such a firehose of scans I don't even have words for it. It's not even beachfront property, we live in a damn submarine.

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a sane practice to keep the marketing landing page on a separate domain than the product in case of SaaS.

Could you elaborate on why? The companies I have worked for have pretty much all used domain.com for marketing and app.domain.com for the actual application. What's wrong with this approach?

If there’s any scope for a user to inject JavaScript, then potentially this gives a vector of attack against other internal things (e.g admin.domain.com, operations.domain.com etc)

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#205

Obviously there are a lot of errors by a lot of people that led to this, but here's one that would've prevented this specific exploit: > As part of our research, we discovered that a few years ago the WHOIS server for the .MOBI TLD migrated from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi – and the dotmobiregistry.net domain had been left to expire seemingly in December 2023. Never ever ever ever let a domain expire.…

> If you're a business and you're looking to pick up a new domain because it's only $10/year, consider that you're going to be paying $10/year forever, because once you associate that domain with your business, you can never get rid of that association.

Please elaborate...

Also, what about personal domains? Does it apply there as well?

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#207

I have the feeling that any day now I’m gonna wake up in the morning and I’ll find out that there just isn’t internet anymore because somebody did something from a hotel room in the middle of nowhere with a raspberry pi connected to a wifi hotspot of a nearby coffee shop.

even worse, the raspberry pi, tripped, fell, and burst into flames for no good reason.

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#208
post #205

Obviously there are a lot of errors by a lot of people that led to this, but here's one that would've prevented this specific exploit: > As part of our research, we discovered that a few years ago the WHOIS server for the .MOBI TLD migrated from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi – and the dotmobiregistry.net domain had been left to expire seemingly in December 2023. Never ever ever ever let a domain expire.…

> If you're a business and you're looking to pick up a new domain because it's only $10/year, consider that you're going to be paying $10/year forever, because once you associate that domain with your business, you can never get rid of that association. Please elaborate... Also, what about personal domains? Does it apply there as well?

People bookmark stuff. Random systems (including ones you don’t own) have hardcoded urls. Best to pay for it forever since it’s so low of a cost and someone taking over your past domain could lead to users getting duped.

Personal domains are up to you.

Re: We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi

#210
post #205

Obviously there are a lot of errors by a lot of people that led to this, but here's one that would've prevented this specific exploit: > As part of our research, we discovered that a few years ago the WHOIS server for the .MOBI TLD migrated from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi – and the dotmobiregistry.net domain had been left to expire seemingly in December 2023. Never ever ever ever let a domain expire.…

> If you're a business and you're looking to pick up a new domain because it's only $10/year, consider that you're going to be paying $10/year forever, because once you associate that domain with your business, you can never get rid of that association. Please elaborate... Also, what about personal domains? Does it apply there as well?

As per the article, the old domain expired and was picked up by a third party for $20. Said domain was hard-coded into a vast number of networking tools never to be updated again, effectively letting the new domain owner unfettered access into WHOIS internals.
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