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I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their fake honeypot
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoWhy would they have Cloudflare turnstiles? Are they worried about getting DDOS-ed?
- petterroea 5mo agoCloudflare have successfully made their products so common people use them without giving a second thought to whether or not it makes sense
- petterroea 5mo agoComing back to point out cloudflare is probably the most common way of hiding your servers ip if you are running a greyzone or illegal service, and its useful for running many websites on the same VPS without reverse DNS busting you
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoSure but that has nothing to do with turnstile. You turn those on when you're site is getting hammered by bots, which seems odd for that particular site.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoDDOS websites get DDOSed by their competitors all the time
- efilife 5mo agoto get credibility
- drekipus 6mo agoTechnically it would classify as a real honeypot site I'd think
- JadeNB 5mo agoThe current actual title and subtitle are: I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their stresser honeypot How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging
- bananamogul 6mo ago"I guess they saw my email address that greeted them. They probably received logs of someone "falling for it", and saw someone was poking around their secret website, and knew who was behind it. They completely panicked." I doubt it. I think the author of this page is giving himself way too much credit. The only evidence that anyone "panicked" is the author's own statements that they must have. More likely someone put in a WAF rule that 401'd for his IP. "By running these honeypots, the police create suspicion and paranoia in the community. If you want to buy a DDoS attack, you now have to wonder if the website is real or just a police honeypot logging your IP. They want people to stop trusting these services entirely." Well, good, right? What "community" is this diabolical suspicion and paranoia being created in? The community kids who want to DDoS some other kids' game servers? OK, again, that's good, right? "But it really just feels more like feds jerking themselves off on how cool they are." Pot, kettle. "Does this video and the honeypot have any real impact? Let's be honest: probably not." How does the author know? According to Wikipedia, the larger operation has shut down 4 dozen sites offering DDoS services. Sure, gov't is often clueless and maybe this is effective or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's an experiment. Maybe it's actually intercepted a fair number of potential customers. If clueless teens are signing up for booters and it's actually LEO who contacts them and says "you know, that's illegal" then that's a good thing.
- majorchord 6mo ago[flagged]
- HanayamaTriplet 6mo ago>More likely someone put in a WAF rule that 401'd for his IP. Why make this assumption when you could just visit the website yourself and see the same 401?
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoI visited and got the 401 but that doesn't mean whatever triggered it isn't automated. The reasonable assumption to make when something changes that it had nothing to do with me. Because 99.99999% of the time, it didn't.
- amarcheschi 6mo agoOh I think I did something similar by chance. I was seeing which websites were associated with some entities, and I found the ones of the Italian defense ministry. In italian defense is "difesa". I found one that had "bifesa" in the link, and when opened told me that I had to be more careful to links I open because it could have been a dangerous website. Flash forward to a year later and it didn't work anymore
- nkrisc 6mo agoSounds like something used by phishing awareness training. If so, then presumably it didn’t work anymore because they ended that or use a different one.
- amarcheschi 5mo agoYes I think they might have changed it
- charcircuit 6mo agoStress testing your own site like the article shows isn't criminal intent. There is legitimate market demand to understand if a service you are running can properly withstand and filter out either large mounts of legitimate and illegitimate traffic.
- stkdump 5mo agoWouldn't a legitimate service for stress testing your own site ask for proof that you own the site?
- charcircuit 5mo agoThere might be too much friction to get someone working for a site to be able to prove it which will reduce sales. It's simpler to just use the legal system to enforce it by putting it in the terms of service.
- AngryData 5mo agoI mean what makes a ddos service legitimate? Plus security is an endless cat and mouse game and asking the cat what the best way to catch a mouse is may not reveal the same information as asking the mouse how they evade the cat.
- tecoholic 6mo agoOne of those articles that has an interesting anecdote but written with a mundane lulz mentality. If it’s for teenagers, by teenagers. All is well.
- tecoholic 6mo agoI know. This was not a helpful comment. Sorry.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI'm not a teenager anymore but I thoroughly enjoyed it, a lot better than some random dev breathlessly talking about how they haven't written a line of code in 6 months, or an article talking about how LLMs lead to the end of programming/the economy/the world, etc etc.
- razingeden 6mo agoIt’s a little shitposty but i had fun. I, too, hate it when people discuss hacking on my Claude News homepage.
- technothrasher 6mo agoWhen I was first poking around with Tor, I wondered how many of the "Get guns in Europe", "Hard Drugs here", "Credit Card Numbers for sale" and such links were honeypots. Luckily, not being interested in any of those things, I didn't have to find out.
- nathanmills 6mo agoWhen I was younger I tried to buy a gun on one of those sites for a planned shooting but it just resulted in me losing my money and not any law enforcement action
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kstrauser 5mo agoYou, uh, OK now?
- skavi 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029540
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- throwa356262 5mo agoWTF is the "planned shooting" you casually dropped here?
- globalnode 5mo agoi was beginning to wonder if this is the new world we're living in now where such things are casually discussed
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
- slopinthebag 6mo ago> Does this video and the honeypot have any real impact? Let's be honest: probably not. It feels like they are just redistributing wealth from the average taxpayer to AI video slop corporations. I feel like this describes roughly 75% of all government initiatives.
- protocolture 5mo ago>99% surely
- slopinthebag 5mo agoI was being polite LMAO
- AngryData 5mo agoOf course not, it seems a rare thing that politicians are chose based on knowledge or merit. Spewing bullcrap, shitting money, kissing rings, those are all great ways to become a politician, but they are horrible ways to direct and manage policy and insulates those people from how the world actually functions. And the only punishment for doing an absolutely horrible job is they MIGHT have to find another job years down the road.
- sans_souse 6mo agoWhy is this particular phrasing; "fake honeypot" triggering déjà vu for me? And is it fake déjà vu or legit? Genuinely asking if anyone recalls this being in an HN in the last two yearsish.
- iqfareez 5mo ago[dead]
- boomboomsubban 5mo agoHN search is fantastic, it doesn't look like it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fake%20honeypot&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- emmelaich 6mo agoIs a fake honeypot ... real? Is een nep-honeypot ... echt? Forgive my pedantry.
- sidewndr46 5mo agoYeah I don't think the author understands what a honeypot is.
- killingtime74 5mo agoNit. Isn't it a real honeypot, not a fake one?
- BLKNSLVR 5mo agoYeah, that confused me as well. Is it a honeypot, or does it just look like a honeypot? And if it just looks like a honeypot, isn't that a honeypot? or if it looks like a honeypot that isn't a honeypot does that mean it's the actual thing?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Nit. Isn't it a real honeypot, not a fake one? The lack of even taking your payment details makes it look either fake, as in still being built or built as a demo, or not being a serious operation.
- indigo945 5mo agoYes, this surprised me as well. Credit card and Paypal information should give the police everything they need to identify the criminal (in a way that's much more simple and reliable than via IP address, which may be obfuscated via a VPN or similar). Why not take it, it's free?
- ralferoo 5mo agoProbably doing so would be against the ToS of the payment providers.
- 5mo ago
- dlcarrier 5mo agoI get 401 errors all three time, because I use web browsers that don't leak enough personally identifiable information to prove that I'm not a robot.
- 7e 5mo agoYou don’t need PII to prove you are not a robot. See Privacy Pass. And I don’t know how a website is somehow going to verify your PII as not-fake, anyway. Likely you just use a shit web browser.
- jmalicki 5mo agoHow a website is going to identify your PI as non-fake? Isn't that the entire business model behind Persona which has been in the news for leaks? (There are a few websites I've had to verify my if I with them for)
- lukewarm707 5mo agothe way to pass captcha as a bot is to pay off the company that makes the captcha by using their bot. cloudflare browser run, superb. no captcha.
- imcritic 5mo agoYou mean you set your useragent to match the one of CloudFlare bot and that avoids captchas on sites?
- lukewarm707 5mo agocloudflare make a remote browser, browser run. you can use it as an API or as an agent tool. i can let opencode merrily browse the web and it doesn't get stopped. a bit like a drug mule bribing the cops.
- lukewarm707 5mo agoi have privacy pass and i really can't make it work. every time there is a captcha it makes you authenticate. so it's the same thing as the captcha. maybe i have it misconfigured
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260430001259/https://lina.sh/blog/ddos-honeypot https://web.archive.org/web/20260430001259/https://lina.sh/b...
- dormento 5mo agoThis looks like a purpose build website for websec/compliance training. It has "demo" written all over it. I think op got bamboozled.