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How to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friends
One weird trick to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friend(s) It all begins with one scary email late at night just before I had to go to sleep: From: abuse@hetzner.com Date: 2024-10-29 01:03:00 CET Subject: AbuseInfo: Potential Security issue: AS24940: 195.201.9.37 We have received an abuse report from abuse@watchdogcyberdefense.com for your IP address 195.201.9.37. We are automatically forwarding this report on to you, for your information.
I thought maybe Matrix or Mastodon could be abused to send commanded requests to arbitrary IP:port destinations, but logging for both indicated nothing of the sort was (visibly) happening. Back in the earlier days of the internet, there used to be a technique called “Idle Scanning”, which relied on 1. servers being way less busy than today; 2. network stacks lacking randomization of some fields and using auto-incrementing predictable counters. With a large enough volume, the spoofed IP quickly becomes widely blacklisted from many internet entities following blocklists, and the hosting provider might take action due to many abuse reports and shut down the server for being compromised / malicious.
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