A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
I have a testing website. I have never gave the address to absolutely anyone, ever. It's not linked with anything. It's just a silly html site living in a domain.
It's still being ping and probed to death by bad actors. No necessarily AI scrappers. But it's dozens or hundreds of http petitions a day for random places all over the world.
There's no black forest. It's all light up and under constant attack, every tree is already on fire.
That's because it's numerically possible to sweep through the entire IPv4 address range fairly trivially, especially if you do it in parallel with some kind of botnet, proverbially jiggling the digital door handles of every server in the world to see if any of them happen to be unlocked.
One wonders if switching to purely IPv6 will forestall this somewhat, as the number space is multiple orders of magnitude larger. That's only security through obscurity, though, and it's certain the bots will still find you eventually. Plus, if you have a doman name the attackers already know where you are — they can just look up your DNS record, which is what DNS records are for.
I like seeing them try and then thinking "begone thot! There is no entry for you"
In fact, I might make a honeypot that issues exactly that
nepenthes is the tool for that
But an IP can have multiple websites and even not return anything on plain IP access. How do crawlers find out about domains and unlinked subdomains? Do they even?
@kossa @dual_sport_dork If you're using HTTPS, which is by and large the norm nowadays, then every domain is going to be trivially discoverable via certificate transparency logs: https://social.cryptography.dog/@ansuz/115592837662781553
thinking about this, wouldn't the best way to hide a modern websie be something along getting a wildcard domain cert (can be done with LE with DNS challenge), cnaming the wildcard to the root domain and then hosting the website on a random subdomain string ? am I missing something
I do something something like this using wildcard certs with Let's Encrypt. Except I go one step further because my ISP blocks incoming data on common ports so I end up using an uncommon port as well.
I'm not hosting anything important and I don't need to always access to it, it's mostly just for fun for myself.
Accessing my site ends up looking like https://randomsubdomain.registered-domain-name.com:4444/
My logs only ever show my own activity. I'm sure there are downsides to using uncommon ports but I mitigate that by adjusting my personal life to not caring about being connected to my stuff at all times.
I get to have my little hobby in my own corner of the internet without the worry of bots or AI.
Every SSL certificate is publicly logged(you can see these logs e. g. under crt.sh) and you might be able to read DNS records to find new (sub)domains. The modern internet is too focused on being discoverable and transparent to make hiding an entire service(domain + servers) feasible. But things like example.com/dhusvsuahavag8wjwhsusiajaosbsh are entirely unfindable as long as they are not linked to
Random subdomain on wildcard certificate, IP written in the host file to mitigate DNS records, only given by word-to-mouth 😅.
Nobody said the uncrawled dark forest would be comfortable.
Servers which are meant to be secure usually are configured to not react to pings and do not give out failure responses to unauthenticated requests. This should be viable for a authenticated only walled garden type website op is suggesting, no?
It's not as simple as "only security through obscurity". You could say the same thing for an encryption key of a certain length. The private key to a public key is still technically just an obscurity, but it's still impractical to actually go through the entire range
IPv6 is big enough where this obscurity becomes impractical to sweep. But of course, as you said, there may be other methods of finding your address
It it had a DNS its obviously lit up like a Christmas tree. If its ipv4 its on shodan. The only way to hide is to have no DNS and an ipv6.
Do you know how they find it? Is it just random input of address over and over?
Almost certainly. There are only 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses, i.e. 4.3ish billion, which sounds like a lot but in computer terms really isn't. You can scan them in parallel, and if you're an advanced script kiddie you could even exclude ranges that you know belong to unexciting organizations like Google and Microsoft, which are probably not worth spending your time messing with.
If you had a botnet of 8,000 or so devices and employed a probably unrealistically generous timeout of 15 seconds, i.e. four attempts per minute per device, you could scan the entire IPv4 range in just a hair over 93 days and that's before excluding any known pointless address blocks. If you only spent a second on each ping you could do it in about six days.
For the sake of argument, cybercriminals are already operating botnets with upwards of 100,000 compromised machines doing their bidding. That bidding could well be (and probably is) probing random web servers for vulnerabilities. The largest confirmed botnet was the 911 S5 which contained about 19 million devices.
I don't know exactly how they do it, but probing every ipv4 address isn't that hard
But there can be multiple websites behind one IP address?! They would not show when onhy accessing the IP. They would need to know about the domains somehow.
I have a DDNS setup. Pretty random site name. Nonetheless, it’s been found and constantly probed. Lots of stuff from Russia, China, a few countries in Africa, and India. A smattering of others, but those are the constant IPs that are probing or attempting logins.
DNS only translate a string address (www.mywebsite.com) to its IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) so that it is easier to remember.
Bots just try a range of address and they don't need to know your domain name. You could have the most unintelligible domain name in the world, bots would still ping your website because they use direct IP addresses.
Fabulous insight. I think that would make me very happy. Bring back the forests! Burn down the Nazi trees!
That’s not just a fabulous insight, it’s a powerful revelation!
How about just living in the actual woods with no internet? Gets more tempting by the day.
Yeah but where i live its to damn hot
Is this hopeposting ?
Kinda yeah, it's what I thought lemmy would be, but more and more it isn't
Damn, how was this not big headline news?
China and Russia do this shit all the time. Now they used a new tool. It's really not big headline news. I'd love for it to be and burst that AI bubble tho.
Back in the days of dial up and bbs this was a problem but you would still get robots trying to connect to modems by dialing every phone number possible.
~shhh~ ~they'll~ ~hear~ ~you!~
FUCK WE'RE TOO LATE, YOU ACTIVATED THE BOTS! YOU DOOMED US!
My bad, I'm sorry
Too late, it's dead!
Yeah it certainly is
Morpheus, that you?
I was thinking the other week about how it's getting to a point that I would consider a membership fee to access something like lemmy but guaranteed no AI or bots or bullshit advertising.
I know it isn't possible, but if it was, I'd pay a small fee to have it.
Do you think there will be safe places on the internet?
If it's connected, it's accessible. Won't matter what human level security we put in place when the datacenters these clankers run on have enough GPUs to brute force their way through.
Offline communication will make a resurgence, and will become indespensible when the resource wars the billionaires are funding reach the rest of the world.
The last reduct of mankind against the machines? Let's call it Sion
I think you're on to something maybe make a movie
How is Gemini fairing in the existing bot landscape? Usenet?
There are plenty of alternative Internets. And even just skipping the HTTP protocol is a start. IRC is a great example.