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Analyzed from 3144 words in the discussion.
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#tesla#ntp#pool#server#requests#com#scanning#don#traffic#someone
Discussion Sentiment
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Discussion (112 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.google.com/search?&q=university+ntp+server+netge...
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/
> We learned that these packets appeared to be legitimate, well-formed Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) version 1 queries, albeit at an inexplicably high rate from each client host. For instance, during one trace, many clients produced about one query per second. This would be highly unusual for a properly constructed SNTP client, since an application which uses SNTP is merely interested in setting its own clock relatively accurately so that its host has some reasonable notion of the current time. One query per second is ridiculous, and is far from best practice for NTP client behavior.
I love articles like that.
"UPDATE: RESOLVED
Patrik from Assetnote reached out to me with a very gracious message, it has been resolved. Thank you!"
edit: erm... @ downvotes. I guess when people want something scandalous, they really don't appreciate things being fixed in a timely manner.
> Hijacking the highest ranking comment
Gee, I wonder why...
The way a vendor embedding NTP is _meant_ to do so is documented here: https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html
On another note, back when I ran a web hosting business we hosted a few NTP servers in the pool. It’s such a simple thing to give back, and worth anyone who can make a stable contribution doing so.
If you see high packet rate from a specific IP address or prefix, it's very likely not them abusing your service, but rather you attacking them by responding to spoofed requests.
When was this page last updated? I would expect that number to be in the hundreds of millions these days, perhaps even billions.
Note that in the past I've had companies writing embedded linux based firmware using ntppool for time sync request their own vendor zones, however a lot of those requests were ignored so it's unclear if that's still expected. In the end they ended up just using the default ntppool domains since they never got their own vendor zones.
ref: https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html
Maybe running a web server on the same IP as an NTP server is a bad idea.
Hell, they issue certificates to IP addresses now. For cloud systems, ownership of an IP could be a few hours.
This has almost certainly been deemed an acceptable risk.
Tangential, but I love the design of your blog. That's so freakishly accurate to old GNOME 2 Ubuntu, amazing work.
Not sure if there is a great solution, but I'm inclined to say that attack traffic like this is the new normal. In fact, the attack volume they got is quite small compared to the volume I have seen on other tech company subdomains - the new normal is probably much worse.
Any responsible bug bounty researcher reviewing the DNS zone by hand would spot the CNAME and remove it from the target list. You don't get to wash your hands of that because your chatbot did it.
It is your responsibility to do your due diligence as a security researcher versus “spray and pray” to ensure you are not exceeding the scope beyond your intended target.
Dump the subdomains, resolve them, and review where they resolve to in order to understand the footprint and attack surface boundaries before engaging scanning or agentic red team harnesses. Automate as much as possible for building the state graph of the target, but a human must remain in the loop to sanity check. To not do this means you could be attacking hyperscaler object storage, a CDN, a partner SaaS frontend, ticketing systems, mail systems, etc (ie anything someone may CNAME off the root domain but that is outside of their organization’s control).
Neat! Didn’t know about this command that’s very helpful
They look to all be log4j vuln scanning activity (CVE-2021-44228), and the volume isn't that high (a few a day, and not every day). They just have some overzealous vuln scanning. And yes, they shouldn't have the NTP pool under their DNS name.
I've had all sorts of strange things happen because of my ntp pool membership, this one is pretty far on the benign end of things.
Akamai, APNIC Foundation, Arctic Security, AusCERT, Avast, Backblaze, Canadian Center for Cyber Security, CERT.AT, CERT.br, CERT.LV, CIRA, CIRCL, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, CSIRT.LI, CSIS Security Group, DFN‑CSIRT, Digital Trust Center, EURid, HelseCERT, ICANN, Identity Digital, KPN, Mastercard, NASK (CERT.pl), NCSC Ireland, NICS, Nihon Cyber Defence, Nucleus Security, Orange Polska, Precursor Security, Protect.ngo, Public Interest Registry (PIR), Red Hat, SURFcert, SWITCH, Team Cymru, Trend Micro, Trivest AG, Tucows, Verisign, VulnCheck,
I don't care what they say they're doing, I hate how corporations can act with impunity with these types of things while everyone else would get a felony for it.
Because that is exactly what all of these vulnerability scanning companies are doing, and all of us sort of just… let them.
Other than not, with these huge companies you have 0 recourse.
Meta not only hasn't noticed, but is currently sending about 11 requests per second to my site. I've also seemingly trapped one of those TV proxy scraper nets as I'm getting absolutely hammered by requests from all over the place now. I get maybe 10 legit visitors per day, and I'm currently blocking 406,787 IPs from things that have fallen into my honeypot.
I've tweaked my site to return empty status responses a configurable amount of time but the traffic has been so intense that Traefik is now struggling, so I'm going to have to figure out something else. I was returning over-capacity errors and I think that was a mistake, I've swapped to 400 range status codes now. I don't want to use Cloudflare so I'm not sure what to do after this.
The people at these companies are either incompetent or malicious.
Might make them scan themselves instead.
Once the asset scanner detects the vulns, everyone will kick into high gear to patch this.
"Hey Texas Model S #345 just left KXYZ, moving at >100mph towards the pad. Everyone get cameras out!"
It'll be gone by lunchtime that day.
One's best bet is to play possum, and use your clients last login IPs falling in your service area geo-IP ranges for a firewall white-list. Then redirect the other traffic for a black hole route.
If the nuisance hosts assume they have driven the host offline, they will eventually give up and move on. =3
As opposed to intentionally being a nuisance?
I see this in cyber clients that are perpetually short staffed and simply accept the degraded system because the consequences are minimal. If nothing important breaks, nothing changes.
This is standard bot crawler traffic. Anyone who runs a home server sees attempts to load wp paths all the time
Edit: tamping down a bit of my prickliness because it looks like this individual is a relative newcomer to running internet-facing services. This is actually a pretty good intro to that: the place as a whole is a cesspool and any conceivable “attack”, scan, probe, pentest is, has, or will be happening at all times. Some you can mitigate yourself, others you’ll need to bring in a specialist service (see DDoS sinks and mitigation services, for example) or contact someone’s abuse address, others you just have to ignore because it’s just not directed at you personally, or just not worth more than three seconds’ thought beyond a firewall rule. This is the latter. Maybe interesting if this is the first time you’re seeing something like this, but for more grizzled operators like myself, it doesn’t even register as notable anymore.
> Speculation: Assetnote pulled in everything it could find under tesla.com, including pool-ntp.tesla.com, which CNAMEs to pool.ntp.org, which can resolve to my machine — 67.215.249.229. The asset inventory saves this as a Tesla asset, and starts throwing exploits at me, a stranger.
> Not a vuln in Tesla, and I'm not asking for anything, but I just wanted to let you know that you may unintentionally be being a nuisance.
This happens EVERY day to EVERY web server out there. I have a personal site that gets thousands of requests per day from bots.
Running a public server (like NTP) means you will get tons of strange requests. Moreso if you run a web server on the same IP because bots will scrape certificate transparency logs. The entire IPv4 space is scanned continuously.
This may sound harsh, but you cannot stop it. It is whack-a-mole. Filter it and move on, go outside and touch grass, seriously. This is not worth being upset over.
I treat these as an opportunity to tune my filters and firewall rules.
No, I do not.
I get thousands of these "security scanner" requests on a low-traffic site weekly, if not daily. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't try to kick in my door. Are you prepared to waste valuable time in your life to separate the white hat from the black hat requests?
I would have added the IP addresses to my firewall's IP blacklist and forgotten about it the next day. It's really all you can do.
i cannot fathom how you could possibly arrive at this reading of the gp's comment, what are you talking about
Tesla is a large enterprise.
They almost certainly subscribe to some overpriced SaaS garbage which is manned by offshore drones who by definition do not care because they're not paid enough to care.
Unfortunately this isn't the 80s anymore where you can ring up a system administrator at a university and get a human on the other end.
That said: cool looking website btw.
I understand that Tesla is treating your NTP server, a volunteer server and part of the greater volunteer pool of NTP servers, as their own infrastructure.
However, I can't tell from the article if the scans originate with:
A.) IT staff at Tesla that are scanning exposed services on what they perceive, or claim wrongly, as their own network for vulnerabilities.
B.) Somehow a rogue operator (read botnet)
C.) A rogue operator who is using the cars themselves to run exploit scans?
C would be the most alarming and concerning.
If it were 8000 requests per second, this might be worthy of some investigation.
But 8000 ntp requests alone consume far less than 1 us cent of compute + bandwidth. This isn't worth lifting a finger over.
"They tried all kinds of exploits against me: path traversal, webshell uploads, probing software internals, probing WordPress and other CMS management endpoints, SSRF, Log4Shell, and a lot more."
I don't go complaining on the internet about the absolute shitflood of compromised routers on broadband ISPs in Indonesia probing my stuff 24x7x365 because I know it would be futile. But if I found one specific american company that was repeatedly probing my stuff all the time? Maybe I'd escalate it.
The scanner is likely illegal.
The pointing is… so stupid nobody thought to make a law about it.