There are four main types of communication mechanisms found:These have short single word names with some meaning linked to their website.
- There is also one known instance where a .zip extension was used! web.archive.org/web/20131101104829*/http://plugged-into-news.net/weatherbug.zip as:
<applet codebase="/web/20101229222144oe_/http://plugged-into-news.net/" archive="/web/20101229222144oe_/http://plugged-into-news.net/weatherbug.zip"
JAR is the most common comms, and one of the most distinctive, making it a great fingerprint.Several of the JAR files are named something like either:as if to pose as Internet speed testing tools? The wonderful subtleties of the late 2000s Internet are a bit over our heads.- meter.jar
- bandwidth.jar
- speed.jar
All JARs are directly under root, not in subdirectories, and the basename usually consist of one word, though sometimes two camel cased. - JavaScript file. There are two subtypes:
- JavaScript with SHAs. Rare. Likely older. Way more fingerprintable.
- JavaScript without SHAs. They have all been obfuscated slightly different and compressed. But the file sizes are all very similar from 8kB to 10kB, and they all look similar, so visually it is very easy to detect a match with good likelyhood.
- Adobe Flash swf file. In all instances found so far, the name of the SWF matches the name of the second level domain exactly, e.g.:
While this is somewhat of a fingerprint, it is worth noting that is was a relatively commonly used pattern. But it is also the rarest of the mechanisms. This is a at a dissonance with the rest of the web, which circa 2010 already had way more SWF than JAR apparently.
http://tee-shot.net/tee-shot.swf
- CGI comms
Because the communication mechanisms are so crucial, they tend to be less varied, and serve as very good fingerprints. It is not ludicrous, e.g. identical files, but one look at a few and you will know the others.
We've come across a few shallow and stylistically similar websites on suspicious ranges with this pattern.
No JS/JAR/SWF comms, but rather a subdomain, and an HTTPS page with .cgi extension that leads to a login page. Some names seen for this subdomain:
secure.
: most commonssl.
: also common- various other more creative ones linked to the website theme itself, e.g.:
- musical-fortune.net has a backstage.musical-fortune.net
The question is, is this part of some legitimate tooling that created such patterns? And if so which? Or are they actual hits with a new comms mechanism not previously seen?
The fact that:suggests to Ciro that they are an actual hit.
- hits of this type are so dense in the suspicious ranges
- they are so stylistically similar between on another
- citizenlabs specifically mentioned a "CGI" comms method
In particular, the
secure
and ssl
ones are overused, and together with some heuristics allowed us to find our first two non Reuters ranges! Section "secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census"Some currently known URLsIf we could do a crawl search for
- backstage.musical-fortune.net/cgi-bin/backstage.cgi
- clients.smart-travel-consultant.com/cgi-bin/clients.cgi
- members.it-proonline.com/cgi-bin/members.cgi
- members.metanewsdaily.com/cgi-bin/ABC.cgi
- miembros.todosperuahora.com/cgi-bin/business.cgi
- secure.altworldnews.com/cgi-bin/desk.cgi
- secure.driversinternationalgolf.com/cgi-bin/drivers.cgi
- secure.freshtechonline.com/cgi-bin/tech.cgi
- secure.globalnewsbulletin.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi
- secure.negativeaperture.com/cgi-bin/canon.cgi
- secure.riskandrewardnews.com/cgi-bin/worldwide.cgi
- secure.theworld-news.net/cgi-bin/news.cgi
- secure.topbillingsite.com/cgi-bin/main.cgi
- secure.worldnewsandent.com/cgi-bin/news.cgi
- ssl.beyondnetworknews.com/cgi-bin/local.cgi
- ssl.newtechfrontier.com/cgi-bin/tech.cgi
- www.businessexchangetoday.com/cgi-bin/business.cgi
- heal.conquermstoday.com (path unknown)
secure.*com/cgi-bin/*.cgi
that might be a good enough fingerprint, maybe even *.*com/cgi-bin/*.cgi
. Edit: it is not perfect, but we kind of did it: Section "secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census".Later on, we've also come across some stylistic hits in IP ranges with apparent slight variations of the CGI comms pattern:Since these are so rare, it is still a bit hard to classify them for sure, but they are of great interest no doubt, as as we start to notice these patterns more tend to come if it is a thing.
- no .cgi, but also http on subdomain:
- no subdomain, no https, no .cgi
- live
- dead
The CGI comms websites contain the only occurrence of HTTPS, so it might open up the door for a certificate fingerprint as proposed by user joelcollinsdc at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280801!
crt.sh appears to be a good way to look into this:They all appear to use either of:
- backstage.musical-fortune.net:
- clients.smart-travel-consultant.com
- members.it-proonline.com
- members.metanewsdaily.com
- miembros.todosperuahora.com
- secure.altworldnews.com
- secure.driversinternationalgolf.com
- secure.freshtechonline.com
- secure.globalnewsbulletin.com
- secure.negativeaperture.com
- secure.riskandrewardnews.com
- secure.theworld-news.net
- secure.topbillingsite.com
- secure.worldnewsandent.com
- ssl.beyondnetworknews.com
- ssl.newtechfrontier.com
- www.businessexchangetoday.com
- heal.conquermstoday.com
- Go Daddy
- Thawte DV SSL CA
- Starfield Technologies, Inc.
crt.sh/?q=globalnewsbulletin.com has a hit to: crt.sh/?id=774803. With login we can see: search.censys.io/certificates/5078bce356a8f8590205ae45350b27f58f4ac04478ed47a389a55b539065cee8. Issued by www.thawte.com/repository/index.html. No hits for certificates with same public key: search.censys.io/search?resource=certificates&q=parsed.subject_key_info.fingerprint_sha256%3A+714b4a3e8b2f555d230a92c943ced4f34b709b39ed590a6a230e520c273705af or any other "same" queries though.
Let's try another one for secure.altworldnews.com: search.censys.io/certificates/e88f8db87414401fd00728db39a7698d874dbe1ae9d88b01c675105fabf69b94. Nope, no direct mega hits here either.
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