CGI comms

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 common
ssl.: 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:

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

suggests to Ciro that they are an actual hit.

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 URLs

If we could do a crawl search for 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".

Table of contents
- CGI comms variant
- SSL certificate

CGI comms variant

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.

SSL certificate

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: