Rendered at 20:11:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
naturalmovement 3 days ago [-]
I front all my honeypots with the IIS landing page precisely because it attracts black hat jagoffs.
Nothing makes me happier than knowing I've wasted hours of their time chasing their own tails.
p1necone 3 days ago [-]
Why stop there? Front the honeypot with a real IIS server, build a matryoshka doll of honeypots and see how far people get.
DaSHacka 3 days ago [-]
Unless you're honeypotting in the IP range of an established organization, all you're doing is getting bot traffic.
High-tier blackhats focus on big targets, and low-tier ones focus on low-hanging fruits they find off shodan or application 0days they've found.
bitwize 3 days ago [-]
"Guys, guys, guys, listen, listen, listen. So I'm in this computer, right? So I'm lookin' around, lookin' around, throwing commands at it, I don't know where it is or what it does or anything..."
I think it's from hackers, Joey the youngest hacker found the bad guys computers, not sure if it's an accurate quote since it's been years since I saw it.
egil 2 days ago [-]
"They're trashing! They're trashing our rights!"
giancarlostoro 2 days ago [-]
"HACK THE PLANET!"
forgetfreeman 3 days ago [-]
Some ATM in bumsville Idaho spit $700 into the middle of the street.
wildlogic 3 days ago [-]
joey, is that you!?
themafia 3 days ago [-]
Noise is a really underrated security layer.
YeahThisIsMe 3 days ago [-]
That's just security by obscurity, which is rated pretty appropriately.
close04 2 days ago [-]
Obscurity is a perfectly adequate layer of security. It shouldn't be the only layer but those who argue against adding it heard at some point "security through obscurity is not security" and never dug deeper.
loneboat 2 days ago [-]
... those who argue against adding it heard at some point "security through obscurity is not security" and never dug deeper.
Ironically, that makes them the exact type of person who would be successfully deterred by a layer of obscurity.
seethishat 2 days ago [-]
I agree. Hiding from a grizzly bear is a good strategy. But if that fails, you will need pepper spray and maybe a shotgun.
Bear Defense Plan: Hide, Non-lethal, Lethal.
Alphanymous 2 days ago [-]
You've said it just like it is, prevention + preparation.
l23k4 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
raverbashing 2 days ago [-]
Sounds like creating an url like aspnet_client/admin.php returning a WebObjects header might be a good hobby
kreyenborgi 2 days ago [-]
Add in a zip bomb or two?
MrDrMcCoy 2 days ago [-]
Now you have me wondering how badly http gzip content compression can be abused along those lines.
wil421 3 days ago [-]
Tell me more…I opened a plex and Nintendo switch port, the scans were out of control. I’d love to screw over port scanner over.
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
What does shodan.io run?
wil421 2 days ago [-]
Not sure but the IPs don’t come back as Chinese and the dns registries, domains, and other data I could find was generated using US address data. Lots of stuff like 123 stree, where half the address was truncated.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> IIS has a legacy behavior inherited from the old DOS 8.3 filename convention.
Is this exposing the underlying OS's behavior coupled with the fact that the IIS document root is `C:\Inetpub` by default? Eight-dot-three filenames are enabled by default on the C drive but disabled by default on all other drives on Windows 10/11:
PS> (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion').DisplayVersion
24H2
PS> fsutil 8dot3name query C:
The volume state is: 0 (8dot3 name creation is ENABLED)
The registry state is: 2 (Per volume setting - the default)
Based on the above settings, 8dot3 name creation is ENABLED on "C:"
PS> fsutil 8dot3name query U:
The volume state is: 1 (8dot3 name creation is DISABLED)
The registry state is: 2 (Per volume setting - the default)
Based on the above settings, 8dot3 name creation is DISABLED on "U:"
Terr_ 3 days ago [-]
Tangentially, that reminds me of how a Windows update created c:\inetpub on everybody's non-server computers, to "increase protection" for unspecified reasons.
While that's still pretty vague, it sounds like the issue was that something running as SYSTEM (the page seems to indicate some part of Windows Update) was not correctly checking if inetpub was a symlink or something along those lines. It also links to a script to set ACLs on that directory; presumably that's not possible to do if the directory doesn't exist.
It would probably be better to fix whatever component to not have the link traversal bug, but maybe there's some reason that makes the proper fix infeasible…
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> to "increase protection" for unspecified reasons
One confusing part is that the blue screen is not a reference to BSOD but to the IIS default page with the blue squares. That’s probably jargon.
The article lists all the tricks I’ve collected over the years doing pentesting and then some, with great tool references. The signal to noise ratio is very high and there’s little “here’s why” filler which instead might just be someone’s way of storytelling. The article drones on, but with actual content as there is a lot to tell. It’s even light on features like trace.axd, but does mention them and their purposes.
I found it an entertaining overview of taking apart unassuming IIS servers and the point of “Recon harder. ” is made very well :)
Edit: s/boring/unassuming + added point was made very well
0x1d7 2 days ago [-]
Yes, it's jargon. Blue screen is that default page. Yellow screen of death is another one, referring to when ASP.NET throws an exception and you have detailed exceptions turned on (which for public sites, you shouldn't).
merpkz 3 days ago [-]
"This is the brute-force fallback when the smart approaches fail, and honestly, it works more often than you’d expect."
Found the LLM generated part.
suslik 3 days ago [-]
Honestly, given how much claude-based prose I was recently reading, I am worried I will soon begin to write in this style naturally.
Why is it stupid to flag genuinely LLM-written content? It might've been thought out by a human, but the final version is clearly LLM-written or extremely heavily LLM-edited.
0x1d7 2 days ago [-]
HN guidelines ask you to not do this.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
While few read them, it might be helpful if @dang threw in the ", or LLM generated content".
da_grift_shift 2 days ago [-]
HN guidelines also say that HN is for conversation between humans.
If we are having a conversation with the author through their article, then the prose should be human too. :^)
0x1d7 2 days ago [-]
The 'humans' guidelines are under Comments, not Posts. ;-)
gpvos 2 days ago [-]
It's mostly boring. About 50% of comments of HN are about this at the moment, drowning out actual discussion.
If someone writes an interesting article using LLM, I don't mind.
Kwpolska 3 days ago [-]
Can we stop this stupid trend to generate prose using LLMs?
shantnutiwari 2 days ago [-]
"... can we stop this stupid trend to flag everything as LLM generated?"
I have trying to fight this war and lose-- this default lazy behaviour "I dont like this post so it must be llm" followed by some idiotic example
Its become a fad here. Half the people dont read any post, just skim it and post "this is llm" and move on
helloplanets 3 days ago [-]
Would be a feat on its own to get Claude to write on a topic like this.
andai 2 days ago [-]
I do think there was a lot of human effort involved. The llm-isms (whether human or machine generated!) cheapen the whole thing, which is a shame.
I rather read bad awkward human writing than LLM generated paragraph number 9 billion.
Tiberium 3 days ago [-]
It did, this article is clearly LLM-written/edited
kitd 3 days ago [-]
Get Claude to fix IIS, or is that not allowed any more?
MagicMoonlight 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
xmcp123 2 days ago [-]
Oh man this takes me back.
Once upon a time, all server logs were basically unusable because of the amount of IIS scanners out there. There was a directory traversal that was literally just url encoding “../“ that absolutely lit the internet on fire for many months.
0x1d7 2 days ago [-]
Those traversal attempts are still very common, right next to the PHP/WordPress script kiddie attacks.
RetroTechie 4 hours ago [-]
Wondering how far back that goes.. Win95 still vulnerable?
(Edit: I mean active attempts to exploit in the wild)
dpoloncsak 2 days ago [-]
"The White Noise of the Internet" as they call it
t1234s 3 days ago [-]
Does anyone use IIS anymore?
prussian 2 days ago [-]
I do. As others have replied, Windows Server--including IIS, means you have a domain joined machine, likely with an SPN of HOST/MACHINE.DOMAIN.
Windows services and IIS App Pool Identities log in with an (g)MSA or virtual accounts (NT Service*) and you get a fully working and managed Kerberos experience without having to deal with 30, 60, 90 day password rotations.
Log into your MS SQL Server with Kerberos, log into some other webapp's oauth2 flow with Kerberos, etc, it all just works.
You can use WinRM with your native Windows shell without having to do anything special, and even technically bypass 2FA since that's just how it really works.
Can you do all this on Linux? Yes.
Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.
zamalek 2 days ago [-]
> with Kerberos, etc, it all just works
I worked with customer's AD environments in the 2010's and I remember whiteboards of figuring out customer Kerberos config. "it all just works" is not my recollection of that 3-headed beast lmao.
samplatt 3 days ago [-]
Way, WAY too many corporate IT divisions.
naturalmovement 3 days ago [-]
Some banks still use IIS.
Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.
It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.
Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.
I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.
Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.
Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.
You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).
forkerenok 3 days ago [-]
Heyyy what's wrong with novel groupwise?
raesene9 3 days ago [-]
Well its document management feature didn't used to have Anti-Virus support which caused me a load of problems back in the 90's when Word Macro viruses were common. :P
qingcharles 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, I regularly speak to folks still running IIS on Windows Server. There are a lot of old apps out there, sadly. Some really, really important ones.
And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?
Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.
chainingsolid 2 days ago [-]
I've seen it used to deliver 'apps' that 90% of a business's employees use. (EX: Met/Team) in the Metrology (calibration) space.
thedougd 3 days ago [-]
Amazingly some companies like Hyland still ship software that requires IIS. Bonus add are the pages and pages of setup instructions.
pjmlp 2 days ago [-]
Sitecore, Microsoft as two other examples.
Sitecore on the classical XP/XM stack, they don't seem to be bothered to update it to modern .NET, as the new products moved away from .NET (XM Cloud and co).
Microsoft still has stuff like Dynamics 365, running .NET Framework.
robotnikman 2 days ago [-]
And NCR from my experience.
swarnie 3 days ago [-]
I would say 75% of my webservers are IIS.
Nothing internet facing mind.
forgetfreeman 3 days ago [-]
but...why?
swarnie 3 days ago [-]
Really simple.
I read the prerequisites of whatever software im asked to install and do what it says.
I'm not spending the next 3 years of my life trying to make some monitoring platform run on WebLogic i have other jobs to do in 4-8-12 hours.
jabroni_salad 2 days ago [-]
this is one of the funniest recurring threads on HN. developers finding out what other developers are requiring from their customers. Bonus points for developers finding out that non-cloud solutions still dominate some industries.
forgetfreeman 2 days ago [-]
Cloud's got nothing to do with it. The thought of standing up a windows box to serve anything other than profiles and user surveillance is simply foreign. Budget webhosting has been a thing for a long time and standing up a *nix VM is also no big deal. In 25 years in industry I never once saw an IIS server used in the wild. shrug
swarnie 2 days ago [-]
I'm surprised by this, maybe its industry specific.
An 80:20 split of windows server to everything else has been pretty common in the areas I've worked both as a <10 day contactor and as a FTE.
forgetfreeman 1 days ago [-]
Era may also be a major factor. When I was coming up through the ranks it was common wisdom, even in corporate windows-centric shops, that IIS was a vulnerability factory on par with sendmail.
vlan0 3 days ago [-]
The entire solarwinds platform(barf)
formerly_proven 2 days ago [-]
The text uses target.com as a placeholder but they actually also have an IIS blue screen: https://knslsd.target.com/
pjmlp 2 days ago [-]
Yes, plenty of Microsoft shops still depend on .NET Framework based applications, or even classical ASP.
For modern .NET no one is really using IIS any longer.
jimt1234 3 days ago [-]
Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.
bitwize 3 days ago [-]
That's the value add. Any dipshit can be trained in the Windows server stack, so you can staff your back office with dipshits. For a while in the early 2000s—before the cloud era—Windows was routinely found to have a lower TCO than Linux as a server OS for precisely this reason. More actual deployments too, especially in corporate intranets.
dagaci 2 days ago [-]
IIS also sits at the back of a many "modern" cloud web type services.
y2244 2 days ago [-]
Lots and lots
A lot of Microsoft devs know very little Linux historically as they used windows and are comfortable with it
Decreasing due to cloud and Nodejs takeup
mpyne 3 days ago [-]
Tons of the Navy's public websites still run on it.
esikich 3 days ago [-]
Yes, but typically just internal corporate intraweb stuff from what I've seen.
catmanjan 2 days ago [-]
SharePoint uses it extensively
2 days ago [-]
AuthAuth 3 days ago [-]
Ah webpage formatting cooked but otherwise a fun read
Group_B 3 days ago [-]
Would love to see a write yo on nginx!
sytelus 3 days ago [-]
This is extremely well done design (at least on full desktop browsers). Amazing content as well.
aix1 3 days ago [-]
> This is extremely well done design (at least on full desktop browsers).
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but on my full desktop browser the side bar overlaps the main panel, putting text on top of other text.
P.S. Other than this, I do like the presentation.
Shellban 3 days ago [-]
It looks decent on my 1920x1080p window running on a 4K monitor, but I have overlapping problems on my M1 Macbook.
mopsi 3 days ago [-]
"Amazing" is a little generous for script kiddie stuff from the early 2000s.
The author has yet to learn the extent to which civilization depends on people not being cunts to one another for no good reason.
BalinKing 3 days ago [-]
The lead says "how I approach IIS targets during bug bounty" (emphasis mine), so (assuming the author is being truthful) I'm guessing the tone of the title is just for fun.
caspper69 3 days ago [-]
Ah yes, the lulz, the great American pastime.
deadbabe 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dakolli 3 days ago [-]
There's like 90,000 computer fraud reports sent to the federal government every year and about 400 prosecutions total. Most of those are concentrated in whatever niche abuse category the government is focused on at the time (right now, crypto/phishing/ransomware).
note: Don't take this as your cue to start messing around with black hat. Don't become the guy trying to explain to your cell mate who's doing 50 years for a violent crimes what a unauthenticated supabase table is and why you deleted it.
cindyllm 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
NooneAtAll3 3 days ago [-]
what's the deal with left sidebar overlapping the main text?
Nothing makes me happier than knowing I've wasted hours of their time chasing their own tails.
High-tier blackhats focus on big targets, and low-tier ones focus on low-hanging fruits they find off shodan or application 0days they've found.
https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e9d8176d-e936-4224-a1d1-f...
Ironically, that makes them the exact type of person who would be successfully deterred by a layer of obscurity.
Bear Defense Plan: Hide, Non-lethal, Lethal.
Is this exposing the underlying OS's behavior coupled with the fact that the IIS document root is `C:\Inetpub` by default? Eight-dot-three filenames are enabled by default on the C drive but disabled by default on all other drives on Windows 10/11:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2684062/why-is-windows-11-la...
While that's still pretty vague, it sounds like the issue was that something running as SYSTEM (the page seems to indicate some part of Windows Update) was not correctly checking if inetpub was a symlink or something along those lines. It also links to a script to set ACLs on that directory; presumably that's not possible to do if the directory doesn't exist.
It would probably be better to fix whatever component to not have the link traversal bug, but maybe there's some reason that makes the proper fix infeasible…
Everything old is new again https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041116-00/?p=37... (2004)
I got no response to that command on my W10 box, turns out for older (eg LTSC) versions it appears to need:
The article lists all the tricks I’ve collected over the years doing pentesting and then some, with great tool references. The signal to noise ratio is very high and there’s little “here’s why” filler which instead might just be someone’s way of storytelling. The article drones on, but with actual content as there is a lot to tell. It’s even light on features like trace.axd, but does mention them and their purposes.
I found it an entertaining overview of taking apart unassuming IIS servers and the point of “Recon harder. ” is made very well :)
Edit: s/boring/unassuming + added point was made very well
Found the LLM generated part.
https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#33-co...
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
While few read them, it might be helpful if @dang threw in the ", or LLM generated content".
If we are having a conversation with the author through their article, then the prose should be human too. :^)
If someone writes an interesting article using LLM, I don't mind.
I have trying to fight this war and lose-- this default lazy behaviour "I dont like this post so it must be llm" followed by some idiotic example
Its become a fad here. Half the people dont read any post, just skim it and post "this is llm" and move on
I rather read bad awkward human writing than LLM generated paragraph number 9 billion.
Once upon a time, all server logs were basically unusable because of the amount of IIS scanners out there. There was a directory traversal that was literally just url encoding “../“ that absolutely lit the internet on fire for many months.
(Edit: I mean active attempts to exploit in the wild)
Can you do all this on Linux? Yes. Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.
I worked with customer's AD environments in the 2010's and I remember whiteboards of figuring out customer Kerberos config. "it all just works" is not my recollection of that 3-headed beast lmao.
Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.
It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.
Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.
I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.
Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.
Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.
You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).
https://bloomberry.com/data/windows-server/
And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?
Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.
Sitecore on the classical XP/XM stack, they don't seem to be bothered to update it to modern .NET, as the new products moved away from .NET (XM Cloud and co).
Microsoft still has stuff like Dynamics 365, running .NET Framework.
Nothing internet facing mind.
I read the prerequisites of whatever software im asked to install and do what it says.
I'm not spending the next 3 years of my life trying to make some monitoring platform run on WebLogic i have other jobs to do in 4-8-12 hours.
An 80:20 split of windows server to everything else has been pretty common in the areas I've worked both as a <10 day contactor and as a FTE.
For modern .NET no one is really using IIS any longer.
A lot of Microsoft devs know very little Linux historically as they used windows and are comfortable with it
Decreasing due to cloud and Nodejs takeup
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but on my full desktop browser the side bar overlaps the main panel, putting text on top of other text.
P.S. Other than this, I do like the presentation.
The author has yet to learn the extent to which civilization depends on people not being cunts to one another for no good reason.
note: Don't take this as your cue to start messing around with black hat. Don't become the guy trying to explain to your cell mate who's doing 50 years for a violent crimes what a unauthenticated supabase table is and why you deleted it.