Post-Mortem of File System Compromise on April 30th, 2023

Null

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True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Registrado
14 de Nov, 2012
At 11:41am EU time I received an email saying that videos in the Community Happenings thread had been corrupted, and if downloaded, were 10 second long still images of a troll face taking credit for a hack.

By 12:20pm, I had viewed the email, confirmed the issue, shut down everything and notified via Telegram that it looked like the entire file server might be compromised.

By 12:43pm, I confirmed that almost everything was left intact and there were no signs of file server intrusion. This narrowed down the scope of attack tremendously to existing files.

At 12:47pm, I contacted the Discord alias left in the troll face images and asked how he did it. He refused to tell me but soft-confirmed my suspicion at the time that it was an attack using a crafted URL to make PATCH requests to the file server (as to update existing files only).

By 4:17pm, I had set up a debugging environment and confirmed the issue. I tightened security in several ways and tested each of them to ensure they worked as intended.

I opted to give the attacker 5 XMR. I did not pay him for information. He's a 17-year-old Turkish 14-year-old Kurdish (self-declared) kid and I wanted to encourage him to pursue cybersecurity for profit. He also could have potentially done a lot more damage if he was really trying to be malicious, so I'm grateful for that.

To clarify, I absolutely would not pay blackmail. My intentions are purely to encourage this guy to not fuck his life up. Between 12:47pm and 4:17pm, we talked a bit, and I feel he's got a rigid sense of morality that aligns closely with my own and I want him to stick with that.

No accounts were compromised and I do not believe any information was irreparably lost except a few recent videos in Community Happenings. If you see anything else missing or corrupted, let me know.
 
Última edición:
Josh could've been very mean to the kid, but he gave him some good advice and offered to pay him for confirming the exploit. Very good fren.
 
Fucking with websites just because you can and not being malicious about it. What is this, 2008? Glad to hear everything worked out okay. Maybe you could ask him to keep poking around like a pocket white hat hacker if he's amiable to it.
 
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And to think that giant multinational corporations have to spend millions to get the level of pen attempts that Kiwi Farms attracts just by being a hive of pure, unadulterated autism... I'm glad to hear that it wasn't anything serious. Null, thanks for everything you do to keep this place up and running.
 
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