VNC Roulette

It's Swedish. Heading says "Main menu" and the boxes seem to be rooms marked "freezer" and "cooler/freezer" as well as "freeze house". Upper left you've got the outside temperature.

api• 10 years ago

I see things that look alarmingly like industrial control. Who leaves wide open unpassworded VNC?

resoluteteeth• 10 years ago

I see things that look alarmingly like industrial control. Who leaves wide open unpassworded VNC?

Apparently tons and tons of people!

an_account_name• 10 years ago

This post is terrifying.

shurcooL• 10 years ago

I can only guess it's people who think of their IP as a password. Like, who's going to guess the IP, right.

cjmoran• 10 years ago

I have to ask, how does one come across such open servers? Do you just try common ports on random IP addresses until you find one that works?

signet• 10 years ago

Could be a research or decoy honeypot.

nommm-nommm4• 10 years ago

This often happens accidentally.

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

Considering how many are a readout, I'm imagining they're read-only and are a shortcut on some other desktop to check the temperature and pressure of their gizmos.

Honestly, read-only public makes sense for that. What do I care if somebody can see the position of my overhead crane?

capote2• 10 years ago

Lots of humans are Chinese.

droidist2• 10 years ago

Yes, about 19% (dropping though)

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+chinese+populati...

capote2• 10 years ago

It's fascinating.

smilekzs• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=87

"Please secure your VNC!"

EDIT: Also: http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=270

"Upgrade your VNC Server license in order to benefit from premium security features ..." "An anonymous user has connected. Number of connected users: 1"

r0muald• 10 years ago

The second one has also TeamViewer for, you know, extra security features.

tapp• 10 years ago

Agree that it's simultaneously fascinating and alarming.

Does anyone know what exactly this is?: http://vncroulette.com/images/176.64.166.110.jpg

semi-extrinsic3• 10 years ago

It's in Swedish, looks like a status display for the post-combustion part (smoke cleaning) of some industrial process, maybe cement production?

The worst one I've found so far is this

http://vncroulette.com/images/85.117.223.103.jpg

which appears to be controls for a small hydropower plant, also in Sweden.

A few other bad ones I spotted include lots of industrial refrigerators, small scale wind power (mainly German), an oil futures trading platform, a fire & gas alarm system control, and someone's Outlook open with some customer complaint emails.

Edit: oh, and there was a Tesco checkout register (although closed).

JorgeGT2• 10 years ago

There is also a browser with someone's facebook open.

__account__• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/images/90.16.192.69.jpg

This seems like a French hydroelectric plant :/

bjelkeman-again• 10 years ago

Did you contact the owners of the hydropower? May be a good idea.

aub3bhat2• 10 years ago

This one seems like bunch of tanks attached to a pressure gauge. http://vncroulette.com/images/96.1.27.254.jpg

aub3bhat2• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/images/101.63.72.218.jpg A pharmacy in India

reustle• 10 years ago

Some kind of banking system?

http://vncroulette.com/images/186.103.207.230.jpg

diskcat• 10 years ago

try cranking it up to 110%

1x01235• 10 years ago

this is not a honeypot is for research stuff & to bring a security awareness, please contact me at twitter.com/1x0123 if you found something should be remove from the site

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=1%27

Poster above noted an implied SQL injection vulnerability in your site. Somewhat ironic, eh?

takeda• 10 years ago

apparently fake: https://twitter.com/1x0123/status/713879106614636545

hyperion2010• 10 years ago

For those who havn't seen Dan's talks before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWck_xcH64

arxpoetica• 10 years ago

Amazing. Terrifying.

krylon3• 10 years ago

Some of the things he found would allow a malicious person to do some real damage, that part is terrifying. But it's also really funny, so I'll go with that.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

As the Germans call it, schadenfreude.

djhworld• 10 years ago

Really enjoyed this talk.

Horrifying, though.

Phil_Latio2• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=1%27

jlmorton• 10 years ago

How terribly ironic.

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

Hah, a SQL error. SQL injection vulnerable?

odinduty• 10 years ago

Oh God, haha. I also have that reflex of putting 's everywhere in URLs. I've found lots of surprises, but not many, to be honest. Not even 0.1% of times I've tried.

tamana5• 10 years ago

Sounds like a good idea for a chrome extension

jaflo• 10 years ago

"is a fake SQL injection error page" https://twitter.com/1x0123/status/713879106614636545

Phil_Latio2• 10 years ago

Oh =)

1x01235• 10 years ago

is fake error generated in the php we are runing , we have so many hacking attempts like this , & even our site don't have a SQL database is runing on flat files as a server ! thanks for your point

foota• 10 years ago

There seems to be an accompanying blog post: http://hahasecurity.blogspot.com/2016/03/hack-millions-of-de...

robotmachine• 10 years ago

Well, this made me do a sweep on my servers to make sure I didn't have VNC running. Tag as PSA!

neom3• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=134 is wild.

skeletonjelly• 10 years ago

What is that green thing on top?

neom3• 10 years ago

I dunno but it's not moving very quickly.

mrweasel• 10 years ago

The round bit? That's a heavy tarp, it's put over fermenters with biomass (pigs poop or similar), as the biomass ferments the tarp balloons up, due to the generated gas. The gas can be extracted later and used in power plants.

empressplay• 10 years ago

yum sewage treatment plant

bitJericho• 10 years ago

I'm seeing someone's checking account. Maybe even a banking system. Not logging into that!

chvid2• 10 years ago

I cannot seem to connect to any of them? Are they all still supposed to be open on port 5900?

jle172• 10 years ago

Tried to telnet on port 5900 of three or four of them, one was definitely still open.

markbnj• 10 years ago

Sad and fascinating. Couldn't stop clicking. Way to go San Jose State, getting in there three times is an achievement.

sengork2• 10 years ago

I don't see any of the screens moving. Maybe they are all idle sessions, however I did not expect that many of them.

Gaessaki• 10 years ago

These are screenshots I think, not live feed.

sengork2• 10 years ago

Some do work when connected to via a VNC viewer. Yes the website only displays dated JPEGs.

radicalman• 10 years ago

Wtf one is a control panel for a major South Korean nuclear powerplant!? How is this site getting these snapshots?

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

Open vnc remote control servers. Point vnc at the address up top and you can remote control the computer. And commit a felony, so don't do it.

Edit: apparent read-only vnc is a thing so many of these are probably harmless.

ams6110• 10 years ago

Some of these seem old. I saw one that looked like some kind of industrial status dashboard but the date/time displayed on it was from 2015.

cure• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=193

I'm glad this screen is sanitized regularly.

borplk• 10 years ago

I've seen this in airport toilets before

cenal• 10 years ago

What unfortunate timing for this poor guy who is now forever captured having dissapointed his client: http://vncroulette.com/images/14.97.72.37.jpg

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=7

The horn button on this one is tempting. Not "go commit a felony" tempting, but still.

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=17

That one looks to have some root term open.

ladzoppelin• 10 years ago

This is really bad software design. Unreal. The person who put it on those SCADA machines are long gone. Now what?

eranation3• 10 years ago

So... what does this mean? I mean, if there are so many hydropower plans et al vulnerable for VNC, how come we didn't have some major catastrophe? Is it simply more common to have a "read only" VNC vulnerability? (which is still a huge problem). Is VNC by default not password protected for read only viewing (and requires password for taking control?) Obviously nothing should be password-less by default, and should not have a "changeit" password (I'm looking at you glassfish) but I really hope that even if VNC lets you be in "guest view only mode" without a password by just knowing an IP (who does that?!) then at least I hope they still require a password to also take control, right? please tell me they do. (otherwise I'll be surprised we are all still alive to be honest)

I mean there are some controls there that I'm sure if the wrong person pushes that red button, something will go kaboom.

And there is no shortage of people out there who would not think twice to blow things up.

So yes, this is scary, but also makes me be very surprised that statistically we are probably not supposed to be alive by now if so many critical control systems have VNC exposed like that in a way that allows full control on the system and not just viewing.

Perhaps it's just selection bias, if the world have ended by now then I would be able to type this.

But still seriously, with all these screenshots, I assume this is not something new, so how come I didn't hear yet on a major real world damage due to a VNC vulnerability?

Is this really most likely to be a read only privacy issue? (which is not to be taken lightly, but not the same as being able to press "shutdown" on some power plant controls)

Pxtl6• 10 years ago

I didn't even know read-only vnc was a thing, and I feel a lot less mortified about the various control panels with instrument status we're seeing. I dont give a crap if the wider Internet can see the temperature of the walk-in fridge at the lab.

chippy• 10 years ago

some are read only, some are full control access but the local user has to authorise, and some are full control with password.

TazeTSchnitzel• 10 years ago

I guess it's just luck that no mischief-maker has gone and tried to do as much damage as possible.

jcrawfordor2• 10 years ago

It's important to understand that VNC is an open standard implemented by hundreds of different client and server packages. VNC does specify a password-authentication mechanism, but whether or not it's used, or how it's used, is entirely up to the implementation. Likewise with whether or not clients have control of the mouse and keyboard.

Historically, open VNC servers have been relatively difficult to find. I don't really mean difficult, just that you had to put some concerted effort into it and very few people did. It's a reasonably modern phenomenon that things like Shodan and other large-scale network scans (including accidental ones, like Google sometimes) can be used to quickly find them, and it's quite recent that someone has nicely packaged it into a website. So this is a problem with very little visibility until today. And it still doesn't really have that much visibility in the right place, which is the somewhat insular ICS industry (and a couple dozen other industries to a lesser extent).

SCADA HMIs and other ICS systems of that sort do often expose a VNC interface with no mouse and keyboard control - effectively a 'read-only' interface as you say. This is certainly less of a concern than allowing people on the internet control, but it is a significant and unnecessary security exposure. The kind of information revealed there can be very helpful to an adversary in finding a way to gain control.

In most cases, access to change configuration is protected, although it's often not protected well. I expect common vandalism against internet-exposed ICS to become more and more common going forward. In most cases it doesn't really have the potential to cause permanent damage, only reduced productivity or mere irritation to the real operators. This is not always the case, though. Idaho National Laboratories conducted a notable demonstration of causing permanent and disabling damage to a diesel generator via unauthorized access to a SCADA interface (the Aurora demonstration).

achillean4• 10 years ago

FYI: Websites like this have actually existed since late 2013 when Paul McMillan scanned the Internet for VNC images live during his talk and made the results available via a website in real-time. He did it again in 2014 at Defcon together with Dan Tentler and Rob Graham. Later that year people at CCC released a VNC roulette and they did the same again in 2015. And Shodan has been grabbing VNC images as well since 2014, made available at https://images.shodan.io

achillean4• 10 years ago

Yeah, the issue has existed for years and is widely documented in the security community. There are a few reasons why we haven't seen more widespread chaos:

1. Lack of network visibility by the owners of ICS

2. Availability > Forensics

3. VNC interfaces don't always provide full access

And keep in mind that there aren't a huge number of these anonymous VNC instances to begin with. We're talking less than 10,000 instances of servers that don't have any authentication and only a fraction of them are ICS-related.

I've written/ presented on the topic a few times, see:

https://blog.shodan.io/taking-things-offline-is-hard/

https://blog.shodan.io/why-control-systems-are-on-the-intern...

https://blog.shodan.io/state-of-control-systems-in-the-usa-2...

nitrogen4• 10 years ago

And there is no shortage of people out there who would not think twice to blow things up.

I think this may be the essential flaw in the logic that says we should be dead by now. Maybe there is a shortage of people who want to blow things up without thinking.

jaredandrews• 10 years ago

Hah! People always say this sort of stuff, and while I don't believe it, I could never come up with an answer simpler than "go read that Better Angels book." I never looked at it like that before. I am going to use this line now, I hope you don't mind!

labster• 10 years ago

And, if elected president, I will do something about this shortage.

mdpopescu• 10 years ago

Agreed. Given that airports have been closed because of an empty cardboard box with BOMB written in marker, if a lot of people wanted to mess up with everybody else they could have done so easily.

wildmusings7• 10 years ago

Judging by the continuous stream of people convicted for buying what they think are explosives from undercover FBI agents posing as jihadists, there are a lot of people that want to blow things up. Or take the 53,000 to 258,000 people that are estimated to be part of ISIS's military forces and allied groups. Thankfully, most of them are pretty stupid, but there are also plenty of highly educated terrorists and they tend to be engineers.

The flaw in the argument is likely GP's inference that "there are some controls there that I'm sure if the wrong person pushes that red button, something will go kaboom." Critical infrastructure tends to be better engineered than that. Cybersecurity threats are newer, less widely understood, and inadequately guarded against, but human error is an age-old problem.

qwtel• 10 years ago

I think survivorship bias is the central flaw in "why aren't we dead by now". If survival depends on an event not occurring, I'd be extra careful in estimating its odds.

eranation3• 10 years ago

Well depends how you define shortage. Every single ISIS member probably would be happy to save a trip and blow himself up and just click a button.

chvid2• 10 years ago

I just browsed around a bit (with a VNC client) and while most are closed now maybe about one out of five-ten are still open. And they are not just read-only access. Some of them are demo systems though.

yoha3• 10 years ago

if there are so many hydropower plans et al vulnerable for VNC, how come we didn't have some major catastrophe?
And there is no shortage of people out there who would not think twice to blow things up.

From my observation, those people tend to be those that care more about doing "flashy" things (i.e. be seen), rather than solving problems and bypassing protections. People that get access to important systems or acquire the skills to mess things up tend to be satisfied by having solved a puzzle and being able to mess things up.

fapjacks4• 10 years ago

But surely some of ill intent have thought to put the two together in the same room?

eranation3• 10 years ago

I hope I'm wrong but I feel that if a group like ISIS could do some major damage using a click of s button, then they would. And they are probably actively trying.

They can kidnap / recruit hackers and force them / brainwash them into doing anything.

They are not stupid and we saw they have no red lines. Instead of banning encryption the FBI and Interpol should force dangerous infrastructure to close their security gaps first.

spydum2• 10 years ago

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/analysis-confirms-co...

Not saying VNC is to blame, but there are a number of folks very gravely concerned about the insecurity of most SCADA systems. When your infrastructure and operations are built on hardware and software expected to last 30+ years, it's hard to consider the security implications so far out.

riskable2• 10 years ago

I think it is unreasonable to expect networked software to stay secure for that long. If it isn't networked in any way then sure, that might work but then again, 30 years is a long time.

Adding remote software control to physical things like water treatment and electrical systems adds a lot of convenience, safety, and saves loads of money but perhaps some of that savings should be spent on more vigilance in regards to security.

pavel_lishin4• 10 years ago

I just found a PracticeFusion machine at a pediatrics' office, with patient names, addresses and dates of birth. Not quite the same scale as taking down a dam, but I would surely be unhappy if my daughter's credit score tanked before her age hit single digits.

dc22• 10 years ago

Anyone want to turn the mic up at the ongoing lecture at the University of Connecticut?

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=429

lossolo• 10 years ago

We need to change the name of IoT to IoZ (Internet of Zombies) because most of them will end up as zombie in someones botnet.

maaku• 10 years ago

Internet of someone else's things.

dc22• 10 years ago

Some interesting metadata:

The dates on the screenshots range from 31 December 2015 to 5 March 2016, with many at either the beginning or end of February.

The computer name of the hacker doing this also appears to be "want.some.vodka".

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=439

ctpide3• 10 years ago

pretty sure that's the name of the computer not the person login into the computer.

neom3• 10 years ago

The xray machine is good: http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=502

(I'm obsessed with this)

zhte415• 10 years ago

TIL:

Many UIs for industrial control systems are very simple.

Ubuntu is more prevalent than I would have imagined.

jle172• 10 years ago

I don't think Ubuntu and Linux desktops prevalence in open VNCs is indicative of prevalence. They definitely seem to be over-reprensented in the various exemples I've seen of publicly accessible VNC servers, I would be curious to know why.

Maybe there are more users on Linux who know how to setup a VNC server or maybe some popular VNC package has bad security defaults ?

sergers• 10 years ago

i wouldn't be of surprised if something so simple was the "hack" that affected water treatment plants in various articles on HN last couple of weeks.

zebogen• 10 years ago

This isn't roulette. It's a slideshow.

aceperry• 10 years ago

Amazing to see how much infrastructure is using VNC.

an4rchy• 10 years ago

Interesting idea, great/scary to see so many different companies and industries here.

This looks like it's going to blow up and get some traction before a lot of people decide to fix this issue with password protection.

milesf9• 10 years ago

I think we need some sort of awareness day for the general public to understand what internet security _really_ is. Whenever I see news reports, it's always cast as "hackers broke in to..." such and such. Yet if some brick-and-mortar business is robbed because the owner left the front door unlocked, people would rightfully put the onus mostly on the store owner.

EDIT: Wow. I'm being modded into the basement. When did Hacker News become so PC? Victim-blaming? Seriously? The VNC connections illustrated on this site are that way because of incompetence and ignorance. The reason there are no unlocked brick-and-mortar businesses is because it is due diligence to protect one's assets from not just criminals, but simple mischief.

barbs• 10 years ago

Isn't that victim-blaming?

milesf9• 10 years ago

Do you have teenage children? :)

mverwijs• 10 years ago

Or is it called "educating"?

ctpide3• 10 years ago

Pretty sure theft is still theft, even if the door was unlocked. Of course negligence can make it your fault, but even if you find a million dollars on the street - legally - it's not yours.

colejohnson662• 10 years ago

Sure, but when Target, LinkedIn, et. al. are hacked, why don't people blame them for poor security practices? It's always the "hacker's" fault. Sure, it's wrong to exploit those weaknesses, but so is robbing an unlocked store. The hacker (robber) is still wrong, but only in the physical world do people put some blame on the "hackee" (store).

BinaryIdiot2• 10 years ago

I think we need some sort of awareness day for the general public to understand what internet security _really_ is.

Nope. This would never work. People don't understand how much of it works. Taking a day out of the year to explain / re-explain isn't going to do a single thing. Instead you need to make computer classes mandatory in K-12 and get people educated on how they work so they can understand the issues.

Take a topic you know absolutely nothing about. Let's say it's aerospace. Now every year we have an aerospace day to try and explain to you how various types of fan and jet engines work. You certainly wouldn't expect everyone to be able to handle fixing one after that one day, do you? Same with internet security.

owner left the front door unlocked, people would rightfully put the onus mostly on the store owner.

So just because the store owner does something stupid you think most people would consider it his fault? That's...that's horrible. Yeah he possibly could have prevented it (though you don't actually know that as they could have broken in anyway; people don't just go up to stores at night to randomly test doors then go home).

milesf9• 10 years ago

School District policies and (ultimately) curriculum are driven by public opinion. How can a public demand better if they are not able to understand the issue?

thaumasiotes• 10 years ago

Now every year we have an aerospace day to try and explain to you how various types of fan and jet engines work. You certainly wouldn't expect everyone to be able to handle fixing one after that one day, do you? Same with internet security.

Actually, I'd expect a lot of increase in awareness of what the relevant issues are. No, I wouldn't expect someone exposed to aerospace day to be able to fix a jet engine. But they're much more likely to know what problems commonly occur and who can fix them.

bnegreve• 10 years ago

Take a topic you know absolutely nothing about. Let's say it's aerospace. Now every year we have an aerospace day to try and explain to you how various types of fan and jet engines work. You certainly wouldn't expect everyone to be able to handle fixing one after that one day, do you? Same with internet security.

People don't interact with jet engines, but they do interact with planes. And they're lectured about airplane safty evey single time they get in a plane. So this might actually be an argument in favor of educating people about internet security.

Bottom line: please don't overuse analogies. They don't prove anything.

Edit: simplify

MarcScott• 10 years ago

I taught high-school computer science. I taught about how the internet works, password security, encryption as well as programming.

I once had a lad declare that GitHub was stupid, because it locked out our IP for 5 minutes after the class tried to login to their accounts with at least half of them forgetting the strong passwords I insisted they use.

I watched a girl log into her vps by running her finger across the top row of her keyboard. When I insisted she change her password, she ran her finger across the keyboard in the opposite direction.

Many people know and understand basic security, they just don't care. They think they have nothing of worth losing, and so don't need to be secure. Even after I explained to the student that their vps could be used to mine bitcoin, fetch pornographic material or send out phishing emails, their attitude was very much - meh!

I'm all for educating people on these issues, but the true way to protect them from their own stupidity is to ensure that it is impossible for them to start up a vnc server without enforcing a strong password. Security by design will be even more important as iot becomes more prevalent.

tl;dr - You can't rely on users to protect themselves.

biot• 10 years ago

It's a nice thought, but I suspect it to work as well as "safe electrical circuits" day would. The internet security equivalent is that companies are selling completely unsafe circuitry with live wires exposed, and we should mount an education campaign to teach people how to cover up the live wires. I suspect once the hardware/software industry matures, we'll see insurance companies become involved and there will be strict regulation around what is and is not safe.

donatj• 10 years ago

I think it's even worse than leaving the front door unlocked, it's more akin to leaving it open.

imtringued• 10 years ago

These analogies are all bad. There is no door, no lock or any other kind of security.

cm21873• 10 years ago

And their insurance wouldn't cover them if they didn't lock the door.

smt882• 10 years ago

That just isn't true. In fact, your homeowners insurance will cover your belongings even if they're in your unlocked car when they're stolen.

Most home burglaries involve breaking a window or kicking in a door, which is why people say "locks just keep an honest man honest".

ekianjo2• 10 years ago

Yet if some brick-and-mortar business is robbed because the owner left the front door unlocked, people would rightfully put the onus mostly on the store owner.

No, there were days when people did not even lock their cars and their houses (but maybe you are too young to have known that time where you live) because it was not expected that anyone would actually rob anything. Especially in communities where everyone knew everyone else. And if a robbery happened, the blame would still have been put on the thief, not the owner.

yoha3• 10 years ago

This is a sensible argument, but here is my counterpoint.

Such situation rely on mutual trust, and only work on small scales (village, loose neighborhood). On the Internet, there are billions of people that live close by.

I think the main discrepancy is that people really do not understand either that the Internet connect them to everyone or how vast the world really is.

stickfigure• 10 years ago

there were days when people did not even lock their cars and their houses

These are still are such days. There still are thousands of communities, even in California, where you can get away with this. The difference is not time but population density. There was probably never a time when you could leave your home unlocked and unguarded in urban cities.

jarcane• 10 years ago

I live in one of the largest cities in Finland, and I routinely see people leave their bicycles unlocked in the town center, because bike theft is so rare that most people don't worry about it, or only take minimal precautions.

Meanwhile, in my tiny town in the States bike theft was basically the single most common form of crime, and I know of one house I would walk by every week that would openly have as many as half-a-dozen stolen bikes displayed for sale in their front yard.

csomar• 10 years ago

These days still exist. And nearby some people even leave their keys on the cars. However, in a city, you just can't do it. Too many risks and people barely know each other.

Now comes the Internet. It's a huge giga-city. Expect robbery, larceny, hacking, and more.

Ensorceled• 10 years ago

Most often people had nothing to steal and often couldn't afford good locks anyway. When the last of my grandparents 13 kids left the house and they actually started to have enough money to buy nice stuff, they also bought and used a lock.

SixSigma3• 10 years ago

people did not even lock their cars and their houses

when you have nothing worth stealing, it is not worth investing in security

jakub_h2• 10 years ago

No, there were days when people did not even lock their cars and their houses

That must have been an extremely long time ago: http://www.ancientresource.com/lots/roman/romankeys_locks.ht...

dave20002• 10 years ago

That not locking the door stuff was simply because back then people didn't fetish objects, and also because they were too poor to have anything worth stealing. Rich people always made sure their stuff was protected (from the poor).

mikehollinger• 10 years ago

People make well-meaning assumptions about security. For example, most of the oscilloscopes that we use at work have remote access turned on with a trivial password (the scopes themselves run windows, and have a VNC server installed [1]).

If you go read Tektronix's instructions - their screenshots show "no authentication" selected.

This itself isn't really an issue, since the networks that we're connecting these to are isolated, inbound-only lab networks. We know that. Our lab admins know that. The network security guys know that. There are exceptions filed for the IPs of these devices.

However, if someone ever -changed- that network configuration and opened it up to the rest of the corporate network (or for some terrible reason, the internet), those scopes would be just as ripe for takedown as the stuff shown in TFA.

It just takes that small network change to enable something -else- to access the WWW (code download for security updates, anyone?) that exposes our other items on the network. In fact, I can think of several reasons why someone might expose a VNC:

1. Actual remote control -within- a facility, but probably in the deployment guide says "use a secure network"

2. Someone wrote a cool Web GUI to "modernize" something, and used VNC (undocumented and poorly-configured) to pull off what they pulled off

3. Someone exposed a subnet to the internet to enable remote access for something -else- which was probably properly-secured, but happened to -also- expose the thing hosting the VNC server.

[1] http://www.tek.com/support/faqs/how-do-you-set-vnc-dpo7000-d...

milesf9• 10 years ago

I'm 46, and yes I remember those days. In fact I live in Canada, and in my neighbourhood it is not uncommon for people to leave their doors unlocked. But if I lived in a different neighbourhood with a high crime rate, my doors would not only be locked, but probably bolted and an alarm system would be set every time I left the building.

The burden and responsibility to protect my home is mine. This isn't an either/or as to who to blame, it's a both/and. So back to the link. If you have a high-value service like an electrical grid, or dam, or nuclear plant that is open to the Internet (the most crime-ridden neighbourhood on the planet), do you really honesty think the media's typical response of "hackers broke in to..." is the correct narrative?

drdaeman3• 10 years ago

But do we blame Google when their robot indexes some completely unprotected webpage that the host owner didn't mean to be public but haven't did anything to claim so?

wyager• 10 years ago

This is more a feature of location than time. There are still locations where unlocked doors are the norm.

FWIW, crime rates have been monotonically decreasing for a long time.

Kiro• 10 years ago

Downvoted you because of that edit.

milesf9• 10 years ago

I don't understand what was so downvotable about my edit.

hrktb• 10 years ago

The latest episode of ATP[0] had a section at the end about people roaming in the neighborhood checking car doors to see if any cars was unlocked and steal stuff when hiting the jackpot.

The owner of the car can blame himself for forgeting to lock the car, the insurance won't blame anyone but won't pay for reparation, the justice system puts the blame on the thief but would not do much about it if it's petty.

And of course if it was a bank leaving bags of notes on an unlocked cabinet in the entrance, people would go bat-shit about irresponsible behavior on the banks side.

I feel that's how it would go for the online world as well.

golergka3• 10 years ago

"Blame" is a complicated concept entangled with morality that a lot of people have conflicting and illogical opinions about.

I think that unless you want to start conversation about what "blame" is, it's safer to use words describing strict logical causation instead. Unlike "blame", causation is objective and doesn't depend on morality.

milesf9• 10 years ago

I didn't use the word "blame" :/

dave20002• 10 years ago

Stuff should be secure by default. No default passwords. No open by default. Temporary dialing down of security should reset itself to secure mode by itself after a short time. Etc.

dang2• 10 years ago

Wow. I'm being modded into the basement. When did Hacker News become so PC? Victim-blaming? Seriously?

It breaks the HN guidelines to do this in comments here, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

milesf9• 10 years ago

Ah. Thanks for the link. I wasn't aware of that.

Will modify future behaviour :)

x0• 10 years ago

this is a horrible thing. does the site really have to include the vnc server's ip in there as well?

ATsch3• 10 years ago

If somebody wants to do evil things with this, they can probably find their own IPs

ctpide3• 10 years ago

I count 541 examples - I wonder how many more are this easily accessible ... I hope each and every one of them has been contacted or at least left if message if possible ...

kbenson• 10 years ago

Today I learned that Chinese (Japanese?) character support in terminals looks way cooler than western fonts[1].

http://vncroulette.com/images/115.218.120.95.jpg

Laforet• 10 years ago

Each character is a 16*16 dot matrix encoded by the 16-bit integer. Old systems (from the beginning of IBM compatibles until early 1990-ish) had hardware accelerators if they wanted to use multiple fonts, IIRC one of the few breakthrough products made by Lenovo.

jaykru• 10 years ago

This was definitely a cool one. If you were wondering, this is a makeup kiosk POS machine in Shenzhen.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

I know it means point of sales, but i keep reading it as piece of shit...

feiss• 10 years ago

It seems Japanese to me. Nice..

davidchua• 10 years ago

Its Chinese.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

Thing is that Japan has 3 systems they use, chinese characters, their own characters, and latin characters. Makes for one heck of a learning curve.

acc02• 10 years ago

Then you will enjoy learning about hardware Chinese character generators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#Early_Can...

This one synthesized characters from geometric decomposition (and not a completely artificial one either, but Cangjie which is actually widely used to this day for computer text entry).

The stored data representation exactly matched the input form (perhaps not so surprising to users of ASCII).

Amazing stuff.

andy9775• 10 years ago

Even though most of these probably have read only access, the fact that its even there shows that the person that set it up didn't have security on their mind. Sure you may not be able to do anything via VNC, but what about other attack vectors on these services? Are they updated, is the os up to date, is it using easy usernames/passwords so you can ssh in for example?

scastillo• 10 years ago

Some of the images seems just fake. It's unlikely to have vnc running on the MBR:

http://vncroulette.com/images/84.201.34.211.jpg

Yeah could be a vm fullscreen but have anyone thought this could be just random screenshots stolen from somewhere? I can make up a very nice story about a flying spaghetti monster given google images index.

kbuck• 10 years ago

VMware has a built-in VNC server on both ESX and their desktop virtualization products.[1]

If you don't configure a password to connect, no password is required.

[1] https://pubs.vmware.com/workstation-9/index.jsp#com.vmware.w...

chungy• 10 years ago

QEMU and VirtualBox have VNC servers too. Can be a handy feature.

Why this would be exposed to the public Internet, I have no idea. Maybe some poor soul was doing this in a combination of being directly plugged in, no NAT/router in the way, and lack of or weak OS-side firewall.

Speaking of NAT, IPv6 might make these things even riskier, but I hope most people are running a firewall on their OS. The built-in ones on Windows, Mac, Linux should all do fine.

nommm-nommm4• 10 years ago

http://vncroulette.com/index.php?picture=536

"Upgrade your VNC server license in order to benefit from premium security features and performance enhancements."

cm21873• 10 years ago

One moment, We are checking your browser to verify that you are not a bot.....

Couldn't get passed that.

whatgoodisaroad• 10 years ago

I'm a bit confused how what appears to be an Apple TV would show up here.

http://vncroulette.com/images/91.146.187.140.jpg

kccqzy• 10 years ago

There used to be a builtin OS X app called Front Row (in Snow Leopard and earlier!) that does this.

arm• 10 years ago

Yeah, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t show the Apple TV there though.

It seems more likely that that’s a jailbroken Apple TV (2nd generation) running a VNC server like this:

http://brandon-holland.com/software/exposed/

hrrsn• 10 years ago

Looks like a jailbroken Apple TV 2. There's a VNC server for that.

sidcool2• 10 years ago

Late to the party and a noob. Can someone explain a bit about what this is all about?

Jaruzel• 10 years ago

VNC Server is an application that allows you to have remote access to my PC. Once installed you can use any other PC (or a phone/tablet) that has the client VNC software installed to connect to it and remotely login as if you were sitting in front of it. VNCRoulette is a site that is scanning for these servers on the Internet, logging in, and taking a screenshot of the desktop. VNC can be secure with an extra logon password, but a lot of systems and users don't bother. It's this vulnerabiltiy that VNCroulette is exploiting. Most of the PCs it's connecting to are 'read only' so the remote access can only see the desktop and not interact with it, but a good many are read/write with no restrictions.

sidcool2• 10 years ago

Whoa! Thanks! Shouldn't these also be notified of the vulnerability? Some of the screen shots look sensitive information.

krylon3• 10 years ago

This reminds me of a program I once wrote when I first learnt SQL, a sort of randomizing port scanner that would just try random combinations of hosts and ports and store its results into a database.

Later, I added stuff like attempting AXFR zone transfers, which was interesting, and I came across some university that apparently had no firewalls in place whatsoever.

I found a few devices with open telnet ports, mostly printers. I remember clearly the thrill I felt when I realized I could make this printer refuse any print jobs or remove jobs from its queue.

I also found a few devices I had no clue about. The latter where the ones I found most fascinating, although I never took the trouble to research what those devices might have been. I suspect, though, that nowadays there must be a whole lot more of such devices around, with IoT and all that.

(My scanner never looked at VNC or RDP, though... This site makes me wish I had thought of that.)

superkuh• 10 years ago

In case anyone is wondering there are 540 images before it loops back to the first image.

golergka3• 10 years ago

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eusw515pxqzu8sk/Screenshot%202016-...

OK, this looks like a system that really shouldn't have a security flaw like this

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

I wonder how many installs date from before the facility was put online, or are online because someone plugged something in that acts as a router without anyone's knowledge.

Meaning that this happened over years, if not decades, because admin A left and admin B was not informed that some box somewhere is serving up something for the general internet net to see.

GTP• 10 years ago

I appreciate the effort to imporve security awareness, but is such a website legal?

secant• 10 years ago

Think of it this way. Is browsing to a random HTTP address via IP on the internet and then screencapping the picture produced on your browser legal?

Then using a VNC client in the same way would fall under the same legal purview. I think as long as there is no interaction to carry out functions, attempt password/username combos, then it's fairgame.

pavel_lishin4• 10 years ago

A prosecutor armed with the CFAA would probably disagree with you.

Browsing to an address with your browser is like checking to see whether a shop on main street is open right now. Attempting to connect to a an address with VNC is more akin to walking around the back of a house and checking if the rear door is locked or not.

tyingq• 10 years ago

Ugh...the login banner: http://i.imgur.com/CpjNoFC.jpg

mercora• 10 years ago

I wonder if it is possible to read input of other users and/or devices connected to these computers in read only mode or any mode actually.

bpicolo• 10 years ago

The fourth one it shows me appears to be a medical records database. Wowzerz

jff3• 10 years ago

Oh, a pediatrics clinic, very nice (redacted image because it contained GASP addresses and names, like one might find in a phone book)

dhbx9• 10 years ago

Please take down the image - it links to real addresses and full names.

pavel_lishin4• 10 years ago

I know that the image is available on VNCRoulette, but I still wish you'd redacted that information.

synaesthesisx2• 10 years ago

Can we find information on this clinic and contact them ASAP?

jff3• 10 years ago

Tendercare Pediatrics in Huntington Park, CA

DanBC• 10 years ago

You tend not to find the names and addresses of 5 year old children in phone books.

1x01235• 10 years ago

we added new machines please enjoy! clear your browser cache & refresh

pavel_lishin4• 10 years ago

Found a big honkin' list of patients, with names, dates of birth and addresses: http://i.imgur.com/VYRgP20.jpg (image has information redacted).

If we want to raise awareness of this issue, this might be an appropriate use of "won't somebody please think of the children".

synaesthesisx2• 10 years ago

I saw patient data for a some healthcare provider (including patient date of birth, phone # and addresses) and corporate emails that are obviously not intended to be public. Wow

EDIT: It looks like a pediatrician's practice too - so all those patients are children. And all their information is just out there in the open....this doctor needs to be contacted asap and secure their system.

joenot443• 10 years ago

I think I saw the same one, seems to be a place near LA. Pretty scary stuff.

reimertz3• 10 years ago

One of these ip addresses where still reachable. Seems to be an desk computer taking order for pharmaceuticals, I could see a clerk write a persons name, what he ordered, everything!

Just awful! I tried to figure out what company it was and how I how to reach them, but nope, couldn't find anything..

This is why I just want to hide under a rock, since it is obvious that a lot of people doesn't know how to protect the data they have collected about me.

1x01235• 10 years ago

i guess you know my feeling, you just found a reachable ip ? i get like 100 online machines every fucking single day! how bad it could be bro?

tptacek3• 10 years ago

Your periodic reminder that under US law, you do not have to somehow get past a login page to be exceeding authorized access to a computer system. A prosecutor needs only to show that a reasonable person, looking at the same computer system, would have known they had no authorized access to it.

That makes things like this a pretty bad idea. At least, in the US.

1x01235• 10 years ago

at this moment we got 91 reports from random companies claiming we breached their networks, i guess they gonna force us to take it down since they are so fucking stupid to add a 8 digits password to their vnc server! lolz

tptacek3• 10 years ago

Taking it down is probably a very good idea, especially if anyone involved in it is subject to US law.

mtmail• 10 years ago

I think you don't understand tptacek's remark. It doesn't matter if they have setup passwords or not.

gpvos2• 10 years ago

I don't even live in the US and I cleared my cache after looking at one of the pages.

uxp• 10 years ago

To be fair to the post, and anyone viewing the page, all you're seeing is a screenshot of what I am assuming a bot or crawler made when it successfully connected to various IPs over port 5900.

drdaeman3• 10 years ago

By any chance, do you know what's the legal status of, say, shodan.io in US?

If the screenshots weren't reviewed - or, worse, hand-picked - by a human, but fetched in completely automated and unsupervised manner, then it's essentially the same as any other crawler bot (like Shodan or even Google/Bing) does. Connecting to random public services running on globally-routeable addresses and politely asking them what they do (then storing the result) can be argued to be perfectly legal.

tptacek3• 10 years ago

The technical details don't much matter. What matters is what the users do with it, and whether their uses can be shown, by a prosecutor, to represent the kind of access that a reasonable person looking at the same computer system would know was not authorized.

azinman2• 10 years ago

Ok this is really bad -- one of the machines/images is showing a practice fusion terminal with PII revealed -- a huge HIPAA violation.

reimertz3• 10 years ago

I just spent two hours trying to get in contact with the owner of a small Swedish hydropower plant that had an open vnc connection, where anyone could turn on/off generators, open the damn completely etc.

Once I got in contact with him, this is the conversation we had:

1. I explain the critical situation

2. he pretends there's a bad reception and ask for my number and quickly says 'I'll call you tomorrow'

3. I explain that I am not trying to sell him anything and that I spent 2 hours to find him to tell him about how anyone can control his powerplant

4. He nonchalantly ignores my warning and says "I have two powerplants that you can control like this, nothing to worry about."

5. I try to explain that a LARGE group of people now know about his powerplant and that I could garantuee that people will login and tamper with it

6. "Hmm, it is a really bad reception here right now, i'll call you tomorrow.'

7. Click

What the actual fuck!

fallenshell2• 10 years ago

Mind pming the phone through Twitter? Maybe I can help, I'll try to call. My handle is @fallenshell.

jay_kyburz2• 10 years ago

Get his attention. Open the Damn! :)

reimertz3• 10 years ago

Naah, will not do that.

People in Sweden made that joke as well. Kind of worried I will get in trouble legally because of this. If there is gonna be any issues with the damm, he will probably blame me. :(

ersii• 10 years ago

If the hydropower plant that is referenced here is "Nordansjö Kraftverk" - then it's been fixed yesterday, through a tipoff to CERT-SE at MSB (Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency).

typon• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure I just had access to an oil well in PA, USA just now. That's pretty incredibly.

nodesocket• 10 years ago

Scary, here is a screenshot showing very sensitive patient information from practicefusion. Just because VNC is open, doesn't give you the right to show everybody in the world. I'm torn about this site.

* Removed the link to the screenshot

perlpimp• 10 years ago

site is hacked

VNC Roulette

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