Professional hitmen don’t actually exist.

Sammy “The Bull” Gravano would probably disagree with you. He’d likely consider himself a professional since he admitted to involvement in 19 murders. Granted they were all mob related, and not “for hire” by anybody with a pile of cash and a grudge…

DigiCert recently was forced to invalidate something like 50,000 of their DNS-challenge based certs because of a bug in their system, and they gave companies like mine only 24 hours to renew them before invalidating the old ones…

My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.

Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.

Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

• A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
• Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
• Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
• Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
• Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
• If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.

If you have ssh open to the world then it’s better to disable root logins entirely and also disable passwords, relying on ssh keys instead.

Port 22 is the default SSH port and it receives a TON of malicious traffic any time it’s open to the whole internet. 20 years ago I saw a newly installed server with a weak root password get infected by an IP address in China less than an hour after being connected to the open internet.

With all the bots out there these days it would probably take a lot less time if we ran the same experiment again.

Depends on the content. My employers sites are a good mix of images, static, and dynamic content, and we rely heavily on Akamai. Their caching of our images offloads a huge amount of work from our origins. We also use their Image Manager tool to optimize a lot of the images seamlessly, which adds further optimization. Their WAF and other security tools are also very impressive.

Well OPSEC is the stated cause. Who knows how the person was initially identified and tracked. For all we know he was quickly identified through some sort of Tor backdoor that the feds have figured out, but they used that to watch for an unrelated OPSEC mistake they could take advantage of. That way the Tor backdoor remains protected.

Exactly. Tor was originally created so that people in repressive countries could access otherwise blocked content in a way it couldn’t be easily traced back to them.

It wasn’t designed to protect the illegal activities of people in first world countries that have teams of computer forensics experts at dozens of law enforcement agencies that have demonstrated experience in tracking down users of services like Tor, bitcoin, etc.

She talks about it in this video.

Smarter bots know how to easily avoid being detected based on the speed of their requests by simply adding a random delay to them. A few years ago we discovered a very slow speed credential stuffing attack (testing usernames & passwords) against my employers site. It was only testing one set of credentials every couple of minutes.

Once we discovered it we didn’t block it though. We were able to spot the attack fairly easily once we knew what to look for, so we updated our system to always return a login failure no matter what credentials they sent.

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Back in the late 90’s I worked for an internet search company, long before Google was a thing. We would regularly physically drive a dozen SCSI drives from a RAID array between two datacenters about 20 miles apart.

Oh there are definitely ways to circumvent many bot protections if you really want to work at it. Like a lot of web protection tools/systems, it’s largely about frustrating the attacker to the point that they give up and move on.

Having said that, I know Akamai can detect at least some instances where browsers are controlled as you suggested. My employer (which is an Akamai customer and why I know a bit about all this) uses tools from a company called Saucelabs for some automated testing. My understanding is that our QA teams can create tests that launch Chrome (or other browsers) and script their behavior to log into our website, navigate around, test different functionality, etc. I know that Akamai can recognize this traffic as potentially malicious because we have to configure the Akamai WAF to explicitly allow this traffic to our sites. I believe Akamai classifies this traffic as a “headless” Chrome impersonator bot.

When any browser, app, etc. makes an HTTP request, the request consists of a series of lines (headers) that define the details of the request, and what is expected in the response. For example:

GET /home.html HTTP/1.1
Host: developer.mozilla.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Cache-Control: max-age=0

The thing is, many of these headers are optional, and there’s no requirement regarding their order. As a result, virtually every web browser, every programming framework, etc. sends different headers and/or orders them differently. So by looking at what headers are included in a request, the order of the headers, and in some cases the values of some headers, it’s possible to tell if a person is using Firefox or Chrome, even if you use a plug-in to spoof your User-Agent to look like you’re using Safari.

Then there’s what is known as TLS fingerprinting, which can also be used to help identify a browser/app/programming language. Since so many sites use/require HTTPS these days it provides another way to collect details of an end user. Before the HTTP request is sent, the client & server have to negotiate the encryption to use. Similar to the HTTP headers, there are a number of optional encryption protocols & ciphers that can be used. Once again, different browsers, etc. will offer different ciphers & in different orders. The TLS fingerprint for Googlebot is likely very different than the one for Firefox, or for the Java HTTP library or the Python requests package, etc.

On top of all this Akamai uses other knowledge & tricks to determine bots vs. humans, not all of which is public knowledge. One thing they know, for example, is the set of IP addresses that Google’s bots operate out of. (Google likely publishes it somewhere) So if they see a User-Agent identifying itself as Googlebot they know it’s fake if it didn’t come from one of Google’s IP’s. Akamai also occasionally injects JavaScript, cookies, etc. into a request to see how the client responds. Lots of bots don’t process JavaScript, or only support a subset of it. Some bots also ignore cookies, and others even modify cookies to try to trick servers.

It’s through a combination of all the above plus other sorts of analysis that Akamai doesn’t publicize that they can identify bot vs human traffic pretty reliably.

Exactly. The only truly effectively way I’ve ever found to block bots is to use a service like Akamai. They have an add-on called Bot Manager that identifies requests as bots in real time. They have a library of over 1000 known bots and can also identify unknown bots built on different frameworks, bots that impersonate well known bots like Googlebot, etc. This service is expensive, but effective…

Not easily. The scammer likely has your current address & contact info, but knows nothing about your history.

To confirm your identity when you contact these reporting agencies they will use details from your credit history by asking detailed questions the scammer likely won’t know. For example it might be questions like these:

• What kind of car did you purchase in 2005?

1. Honda
2. Ford
3. Saab
4. Jeep
5. None of the above

• Which one of these companies did you work for previously?

1. IBM
2. Pizza Hut
3. Macy’s
4. Jiffy Lube
5. None of the above

They’ll throw 3 or 4 questions like these at you that you’ll have to answer correctly. They might involve places you used to live, banks you have had accounts with, etc. The chances of a scammer with your SSN knowing all these details about you is pretty tiny.

The credit monitoring companies have your up-to-date contact information (and verified) when you put the freeze in place. Now, should a third party try to open an account, etc. in your name it should be blocked from happening and the credit monitoring company should contact you.

If a scammer tries to unfreeze or otherwise modify your account with them they should also contact you.

If/when they contact you or you request your account be unfrozen then they’ll use old credit history to confirm your identity. These are a series of three or four random questions that a scammer is unlikely to know. For example they might ask you what kind of car you purchased in 2005, then give you 4 options, like Ford, Honda, Jaguar, or BMW, and then also a “nine of the above” option. Then they might ask you which of the following street addresses you used to live at, and list 4 seemingly random addresses, one of which you might have lived at.

Years ago I worked at a company where they based server root/admin passwords on song lyrics. The person who came up with it clearly liked classic rock. I still remember at least one of them:

4ThoseAboutToRockWeSaluteYou!

Our web servers are locked down in such a way that you can’t copy data off of them using standard protocols like scp, ftp, and even http, etc. Our firewall blocks all such outbound traffic.

This hacker found a bug in a framework used on our web servers that let him execute commands remotely. When commands to copy data off the server failed using those more typical methods he switched to a more novel (and difficult) method of leveraging DNS instead. He discovered we weren’t locking DNS down the same way we were locking other protocols down and used that as a way to extract data from our server.