I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their fake honeypot

https://lina.sh/blog/ddos-honeypot

by fishgoesblub • 3 months ago

158 73 3 months ago

lina.sh

drekipus• 3 months ago

Technically it would classify as a real honeypot site I'd think

JadeNB• 3 months ago

The 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• 3 months 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.

HanayamaTriplet• 3 months 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?

TurdF3rguson4• 3 months ago

I 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.

amarcheschi2• 3 months ago

Oh 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• 3 months ago

Sounds 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.

amarcheschi2• 3 months ago

Yes I think they might have changed it

charcircuit2• 3 months ago

Stress 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• 3 months ago

Wouldn't a legitimate service for stress testing your own site ask for proof that you own the site?

charcircuit2• 3 months ago

There 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.

AngryData2• 3 months ago

I 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.

tecoholic2• 3 months ago

One 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.

tecoholic2• 3 months ago

I know. This was not a helpful comment. Sorry.

slopinthebag3• 3 months ago

I'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• 3 months ago

It’s a little shitposty but i had fun.

I, too, hate it when people discuss hacking on my Claude News homepage.

technothrasher• 3 months ago

When 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• 3 months ago

When 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

kstrauser• 3 months ago

You, uh, OK now?

throwa356262• 3 months ago

WTF is the "planned shooting" you casually dropped here?

akimbostrawman2• 3 months ago

If they use surveillance coins like BTC they are 100% a honeypot/scam.

pixel_popping2• 3 months ago

not at all, ton of legit sellers on markets that still use BTC, you don't know what you are talking about or you haven't been a long-term customer.

derelicta• 3 months ago

Most of the legit stuff was on telegram, surprisingly or not. I know people who bought uh firearms and more there. Unfortunately, it feels like it disappeared at the same time as the proximity feature

slopinthebag3• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

99% surely

slopinthebag3• 3 months ago

I was being polite LMAO

AngryData2• 3 months ago

Of 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• 3 months ago

Why 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.

boomboomsubban• 3 months ago

HN search is fantastic, it doesn't look like it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

emmelaich• 3 months ago

Is a fake honeypot ... real?

Is een nep-honeypot ... echt?

Forgive my pedantry.

sidewndr46• 3 months ago

Yeah I don't think the author understands what a honeypot is.

ronsor• 3 months ago

It's just redundant. The author surely knows but typed "fake honeypot" like how everyone else types "ATM machine."

TurdF3rguson4• 3 months ago

Why would they have Cloudflare turnstiles? Are they worried about getting DDOS-ed?

petterroea2• 3 months ago

Cloudflare have successfully made their products so common people use them without giving a second thought to whether or not it makes sense

petterroea2• 3 months ago

Coming 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

tardedmeme• 3 months ago

DDOS websites get DDOSed by their competitors all the time

efilife• 3 months ago

to get credibility

killingtime74• 3 months ago

Nit. Isn't it a real honeypot, not a fake one?

BLKNSLVR• 3 months ago

Yeah, 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?

IIAOPSW• 3 months ago

Its a honeypotpot

JumpCrisscross• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Yes, 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?

nicman23• 3 months ago

fake real one

sundarurfriend• 3 months ago

I assume the word is in there for the sake of people who don't know what a honeypot is. It gets them curious that law enforcement set up something fake, even if they don't immediately know what it is for.

stavros2• 3 months ago

It's a fake honeypot, you investigate it to see how it's done and they send guns and drugs to your house instead.

dlcarrier2• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

You 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• 3 months ago

How 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)

lukewarm7073• 3 months ago

i 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

walletdrainer• 3 months ago

I doubt you are regularly getting 401s because of this.

slumberlust• 3 months ago

Ironically, blocking trackers gives you even more uniqueness.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

dlcarrier2• 3 months ago

I'm not expressly trying to block trackers; I'm just trying to find a web browser that doesn't eat all my RAM, and WebKit seems to be the best engine for it, but I don't use Apple's hardware, so I end up with some pretty oddball browsers, which also send out less tracking information.

Of course, using an oddball browser in and of itself is easily trackable, but that's not what the bot-detection software is looking for, so it defaults to assuming I'm a bot.

pixel_popping2• 3 months ago

Just fyi, the EFF tool is very minimal, there is fingerprinting methods that are durable cross-browsers, all the methods cited are weak.

Imustaskforhelp• 3 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260430001259/https://lina.sh/b...

dormento• 3 months ago

This looks like a purpose build website for websec/compliance training. It has "demo" written all over it. I think op got bamboozled.

I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their fake honeypot

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