Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time

Posted by denysvitali 10 hours ago

Comments

Comment by naturalmovement 9 hours 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.

Comment by p1necone 8 hours ago

Why stop there? Front the honeypot with a real IIS server, build a matryoshka doll of honeypots and see how far people get.

Comment by DaSHacka 5 hours 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.

Comment by bitwize 3 hours 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..."

Comment by forgetfreeman 3 hours ago

Some ATM in bumsville Idaho spit $700 into the middle of the street.

Comment by wildlogic 3 hours ago

joey, is that you!?

Comment by stavros 2 hours ago

Where's that from?

Comment by bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by egil 7 minutes ago

"They're trashing! They're trashing our rights!"

Comment by wil421 6 hours 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.

Comment by themafia 8 hours ago

Noise is a really underrated security layer.

Comment by YeahThisIsMe 1 hour ago

That's just security by obscurity, which is rated pretty appropriately.

Comment by close04 18 minutes 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.

Comment by l23k4 28 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by Lammy 7 hours 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:"

Comment by Terr_ 5 hours 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.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2684062/why-is-windows-11-la...

Comment by mook 1 hour ago

That page eventually leads to the CVE page: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

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…

Comment by Lammy 4 hours ago

> to "increase protection" for unspecified reasons

Everything old is new again https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041116-00/?p=37... (2004)

Comment by raesene9 2 hours ago

The original research for this is at https://soroush.me/downloadable/microsoft_iis_tilde_characte...

Comment by hstaab 8 hours ago

The tone of this is something else

Comment by andai 7 hours ago

Several times, I wondered if Claude wrote it.

Comment by Stitch4223 6 hours ago

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

Comment by merpkz 2 hours 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.

Comment by suslik 2 hours 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.

Comment by xeyownt 1 hour ago

Found the LLM generated comment.

... can we stop this stupid trend to flag everything as LLM generated?

Comment by Kwpolska 53 minutes ago

Can we stop this stupid trend to generate prose using LLMs?

Comment by Tiberium 3 hours ago

It did, this article is clearly LLM-written/edited

Comment by kitd 1 hour ago

Get Claude to fix IIS, or is that not allowed any more?

Comment by helloplanets 2 hours ago

Would be a feat on its own to get Claude to write on a topic like this.

Comment by MagicMoonlight 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by t1234s 7 hours ago

Does anyone use IIS anymore?

Comment by samplatt 5 hours ago

Way, WAY too many corporate IT divisions.

Comment by qingcharles 6 hours 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.

Comment by naturalmovement 5 hours 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).

Comment by forkerenok 2 hours ago

Heyyy what's wrong with novel groupwise?

Comment by raesene9 2 hours 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

Comment by AznHisoka 5 hours ago

A lot of big corps still use it.

https://bloomberry.com/data/windows-server/

Comment by thedougd 5 hours ago

Amazingly some companies like Hyland still ship software that requires IIS. Bonus add are the pages and pages of setup instructions.

Comment by vlan0 7 hours ago

The entire solarwinds platform(barf)

Comment by swarnie 3 hours ago

I would say 75% of my webservers are IIS.

Nothing internet facing mind.

Comment by forgetfreeman 3 hours ago

but...why?

Comment by swarnie 2 hours 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.

Comment by esikich 5 hours ago

Yes, but typically just internal corporate intraweb stuff from what I've seen.

Comment by mpyne 6 hours ago

Tons of the Navy's public websites still run on it.

Comment by jimt1234 3 hours 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.

Comment by bitwize 3 hours 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.

Comment by AuthAuth 8 hours ago

Ah webpage formatting cooked but otherwise a fun read

Comment by Group_B 7 hours ago

Would love to see a write yo on nginx!

Comment by sytelus 8 hours ago

This is extremely well done design (at least on full desktop browsers). Amazing content as well.

Comment by aix1 4 hours 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.

Comment by Shellban 3 hours ago

It looks decent on my 1920x1080p window running on a 4K monitor, but I have overlapping problems on my M1 Macbook.

Comment by mopsi 8 hours 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.

Comment by BalinKing 6 hours 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.

Comment by caspper69 7 hours ago

Ah yes, the lulz, the great American pastime.

Comment by deadbabe 7 hours ago

Civilization has a way of dealing with these individuals: prison.

Comment by dakolli 5 hours 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.