after yesterday's reveal[1]: facebook should certainly be down as "scams"
I don’t suppose they use DNS to find their command-and-control servers? It’d be funny if Cloudflare could steal the botnet that way. (For the public good. I know that actually doing such a thing would raise serious concerns. Never know, maybe there would be a revival of interest in DNSSEC.) I remember reading a case within the last few years of finding expired domains in some malware’s list of C2 servers, and registering them in order to administer disinfectant. Sadly, IoT nonsense probably can’t be properly fixed, so they could probably reinfect it even if you disinfected it.
There's ethical ways to do things: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/court-authorized-ope...
I'm not saying I agree with it but we're all engineers, the internet and everything built on it was engineered, to put up with script kiddies and hacked computers and not-so-tech-savvy internet citizens using their devices and installing Infatica, and other malware/proxy services on their devices because it came within the agreement for installing some free app where their kids could 'pop bubbles' on their parents phones or some free desktop app included it; then distinguishing their IP addresses and IP-scores as they blend in with their regular human traffic makes it hard to block it. Ain't nobody got time for whack-a-mole internet, families and businesses will need to secure their networks.
Honestly I'd be ok with an up-to-date live list of all known infected IP addresses and their last timestamp for what, and who detected them as a bot/malicious IP address so I could just use some simple ipsets and iptables, or make a simple script to disallow things like posting, interactions while still allowing them to see content on websites would be ideal. Add a little banner 'you're infected, or somebody on your network is infected, this is how to fix it and practice best security, and more info on the subject'
These services switched from DDoS/attacks to renting out their hacked network spaces. They don't need to be making bank at our expense.
"We" could pay for VPN access, but paying for the connection twice (local ISP and vpn ISP) adds up. And now the ball is in the VPN provider court.
That's PEBCAK.
If we expected airplanes or cars to be able to be safely operated by people with zero understanding of how such vehicles work, nobody would be getting anywhere.
You eventually reach a level of stupidity and/or incompetence after which trying to alter the product to coddle those users becomes counterproductive.
Also, many of the top 100 domains serve user-generated content (like AWS/S3). Blindly trusting anything from them just because they are big is so woefully misguided it boggles my mind; I seriously doubt that anyone is actually doing what is described in the article.
"We should have two rankings: one representing trust and real human use, and another derived from raw DNS volume." (citing Mr Greenland)
bradly•3mo ago
Isn't identifying real humans an unsolved problem? I'm not sure efforts to hide the truth that these domain are actually the most requested domains does anyone any favors. Is there something using these rankings as an authoritative list or are they just vanity metrics similar to the Alexa Top Site rankings of yore? If they are authoritative, then Cloudflare defining "trusted" is going to be problematic as I would expect them to hide that logic to avoid gaming.
iamkonstantin•3mo ago
I'm not sure this was ever a problem to begin with. The obsession with "confirm you are human" has created a lot of "bureaucracy" on technical level without actually protecting websites from unauthorised use. Why not actually bite the bullet and allow automations to interact with web resources instead of bothering humans to solve puzzles 10 times per day?
> Cloudflare defining "trusted"
They would love to monetise the opportunity, no doubt
nickff•3mo ago
This is a great idea if you've developed your 'full-stack', but if you're interfacing with others, it often doesn't work well. For example, if you use an external payment processor, and allow bots to constantly test stolen credit card data, you will eventually get booted from the service.
isodev•3mo ago
AnthonyMouse•3mo ago
That is also notably a completely unnecessary dumpster fire created by the credit card companies. Hey guys, how about an API that will request the credit card company to send a text/email to the cardholder asking them to confirm they want to make a payment to Your Company, and then let your company know in real time whether they said yes? Use that once when they first add the card and you're not going to be a very useful service for card testing.
CamouflagedKiwi•3mo ago
AnthonyMouse•3mo ago
What you need is for all card issuers to be required to implement it by the network. Otherwise you'll still have people showing up to test all the cards that don't support it and the payment processors would still kick you off for that.
bradly•3mo ago
I mostly just let the bots have my sites, but I also don't have anything popular enough that it costs me money to do so. If I was paying for extra compute or bandwidth to accommodate bots, I may have a stronger stance.
I do feel a burden with my private site that has a request an account form that has no captcha or bot blocking technology. Fake account requests are 100 to 1 real account, but this is my burden as a site owner, not my users' burden. Currently the fake account requests are easy enough to scan and I think I do a good job of picking out the humans, but I can't be sure and I fear this works because I run small software.
jacquesm•3mo ago
vachina•2mo ago