I scanned Austria

Re:I scanned Austria by piokoch on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:07AM (#19122059)

I think soon or later we will need some kind of public institution that will do this sort of scans; all those unsecured IoT printers, vacuum cleaners, fridges, abandoned servers, Synology servers, etc. would become a real threat at some point and the costs of dealing with issues caused by them like identity theft, false accusations because on someone's server there is child porn uploaded by a cracker, bot nets will be more costly than having some institution running routine scans and sending warnings.

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Re:I scanned Austria by FrankDixon on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:26AM (#19122408)

In germany the federal bureau of security in IT actually does that. They send the admins an email: https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/IT-Crisis-Management/CERT-...

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Re:I scanned Austria by ktpsns on Saturday February 09, 2019 @04:21PM (#19124716)

Actually I once got a mail by them, forwarded via several intermediate admins in a university network. It was an information about a public reachable DNS server on my server. Nowadays, this can be abused for DNS replay attacks or so. What a pity. Things where so easy 20 years ago.

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Re:I scanned Austria by mikecb on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:53AM (#19122547)

Japan is doing this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/japanese-government-plans-to-h...

In the US, DHS does this for the federal government, as well as some state and private organizations: https://www.us-cert.gov/resources/ncats

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Re:I scanned Austria by Forge36 on Saturday February 09, 2019 @12:10PM (#19123373)

What's the best way to self scan? I recently bought a wifi camera and digging through the settings I couldn't find a way to block external access. Ultimately I had to block is access via my router, however consumer models are terrible about blocking access to the internet.

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Re:I scanned Austria by gerdesj on Saturday February 09, 2019 @05:19PM (#19125038)

Phone a friend! Go to a friend's house and run nmap (zenmap for a GUI if you like, https://nmap.org/download.html most common OSs supported). Do the same for them in return.

You might also like to explore this: https://www.shodan.io/ and if you have some time on your hands this: https://www.kali.org/

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Re:I scanned Austria by bboreham on Saturday February 09, 2019 @12:44PM (#19123543)

Most consumer routers will by default block a connection _from_ the Internet. They use a private address range and apply NAT to outgoing connections, so explicit configuration is needed to do something with an incoming connection.

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Re:I scanned Austria by foobiekr on Saturday February 09, 2019 @04:13PM (#19124676)

Well. UPnP does end up being supported on many consumer routers.

The big issue for consumer routers is, admittedly, the shoddy quality of the firmware and the fact that even on the occasion where vulnerabilities are fixed, those releases often do not get installed.

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Re:I scanned Austria by duncaen on Saturday February 09, 2019 @01:35PM (#19123798)

And that is why they implement UPnP to punch holes through it to avoid users having to manually configure routers.

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Re:I scanned Austria by corndoge on Saturday February 09, 2019 @02:17PM (#19124023)

Say it with me

NAT Is Not A Firewall

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Re:I scanned Austria by hmhhcycbtsc557 on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:18PM (#19125822)

I believe you, but I have little expertise. Could you explain or give examples why?

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Re:I scanned Austria by IcePic on Monday February 11, 2019 @01:38PM (#19136977)

Some people would state "this box is not on the internet" while it actually is only behind nat. As soon as you have two such boxes being able to communicate, for instance "two laptops playing online together" you realize they ARE on the internet. With home-routers allowing UPNP and such things, its even more open than that.

So the general idea that things will be safe from being behind nat is more or less wrong, unless you have 100% control over all possible traffic generated from the inner host(s), at which point you could have had it without firewall more or less. Will your robo-hover never phone home, never look for tuesday patches, java updates, OTA firmwares or talk to some license server or whatever? Then nat is ok, but if any of this can happen in some situation, then it is "on the internet" even if it started out behind nat.

It moves a machine along the scale from unreachable closer to unprotected-and-exposed-to-everything even if it's not all the way there.

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Re:I scanned Austria by Forge36 on Sunday February 10, 2019 @10:34AM (#19128137)

Unfortunately thats the opposite of my experience with the camera

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Re:I scanned Austria by Raphael on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:07PM (#19124293)

If only the NSA dragnet threw us a bone.

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Re:I scanned Austria by canadev on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:13AM (#19122081)

it's like getting your kids vaccinated

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Re:I scanned Austria by lazyjones on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:50AM (#19122236)

We don't need public institutions. It's the responsibility of ISPs to prevent security problems, spam zombie servers/appliances etc. in their networks, so they should perform these scans and warn first, then disconnect customers with problematic devices.

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Re:I scanned Austria by evrydayhustling on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:41AM (#19122483)

I like the distributed spirit of this, but it only works where there is another layer holding the ISPs accountable - whether it's other ISPs or a government body. Right now their incentives are only to satisfy customers' perceived needs, which leaves nobody incentivized to prevent endpoint-to-endpoint harm.

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Re:I scanned Austria by groby_b on Saturday February 09, 2019 @11:42AM (#19123190)

But the ISPs are not held responsible. They can externalize costs to society, and so they do so - because that is what capitalism mandates. Without an institution that puts those costs back where they belong, nothing will change, because it is cheaper not to change.

I'd recommend reading up on the Cuyahoga River, the Clean Water Act, and the formation of the EPA - it's pretty much the same problem. Industry creating problems by abdicating its responsibility, necessitating a legal solution. And enforcing that requires a public institution.

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Re:I scanned Austria by lifeisstillgood on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:52AM (#19122245)

Charge per device access? And those devices need certificates of worthiness similar to cars MOT certificates (UK example)

An interesting idea.

What is the minimum viable "superhighway-fitness" of a device?

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