Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time

https://mll.sh/humiliating-iis-servers-for-fun-and-jail-time/

by denysvitali • 1 month ago

365 89 1 month ago

mll.sh

naturalmovement2• 1 month ago

I front all my honeypots with the IIS landing page precisely because it attracts black hat jagoffs.

Nothing makes me happier than knowing I've wasted hours of their time chasing their own tails.

themafia• 1 month ago

Noise is a really underrated security layer.

YeahThisIsMe• 1 month ago

That's just security by obscurity, which is rated pretty appropriately.

p1necone• 1 month ago

Why stop there? Front the honeypot with a real IIS server, build a matryoshka doll of honeypots and see how far people get.

wil4212• 1 month ago

Tell me more…I opened a plex and Nintendo switch port, the scans were out of control. I’d love to screw over port scanner over.

fragmede2• 1 month ago

What does shodan.io run?

DaSHacka• 1 month ago

Unless you're honeypotting in the IP range of an established organization, all you're doing is getting bot traffic.

High-tier blackhats focus on big targets, and low-tier ones focus on low-hanging fruits they find off shodan or application 0days they've found.

bitwize2• 1 month ago

"Guys, guys, guys, listen, listen, listen. So I'm in this computer, right? So I'm lookin' around, lookin' around, throwing commands at it, I don't know where it is or what it does or anything..."

raverbashing• 1 month ago

Sounds like creating an url like aspnet_client/admin.php returning a WebObjects header might be a good hobby

kreyenborgi• 1 month ago

Add in a zip bomb or two?

hstaab• 1 month ago

The tone of this is something else

andai2• 1 month ago

Several times, I wondered if Claude wrote it.

Stitch4223• 1 month ago

One confusing part is that the blue screen is not a reference to BSOD but to the IIS default page with the blue squares. That’s probably jargon.

The article lists all the tricks I’ve collected over the years doing pentesting and then some, with great tool references. The signal to noise ratio is very high and there’s little “here’s why” filler which instead might just be someone’s way of storytelling. The article drones on, but with actual content as there is a lot to tell. It’s even light on features like trace.axd, but does mention them and their purposes.

I found it an entertaining overview of taking apart unassuming IIS servers and the point of “Recon harder. ” is made very well :)

Edit: s/boring/unassuming + added point was made very well

Tiberium• 1 month ago

It did, this article is clearly LLM-written/edited

merpkz• 1 month ago

"This is the brute-force fallback when the smart approaches fail, and honestly, it works more often than you’d expect."

Found the LLM generated part.

helloplanets• 1 month ago

Would be a feat on its own to get Claude to write on a topic like this.

kitd• 1 month ago

Get Claude to fix IIS, or is that not allowed any more?

AuthAuth• 1 month ago

Ah webpage formatting cooked but otherwise a fun read

sytelus• 1 month ago

This is extremely well done design (at least on full desktop browsers). Amazing content as well.

mopsi• 1 month ago

"Amazing" is a little generous for script kiddie stuff from the early 2000s.

The author has yet to learn the extent to which civilization depends on people not being cunts to one another for no good reason.

caspper69• 1 month ago

Ah yes, the lulz, the great American pastime.

BalinKing• 1 month ago

The lead says "how I approach IIS targets during bug bounty" (emphasis mine), so (assuming the author is being truthful) I'm guessing the tone of the title is just for fun.

aix1• 1 month ago

This is extremely well done design (at least on full desktop browsers).

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but on my full desktop browser the side bar overlaps the main panel, putting text on top of other text.

P.S. Other than this, I do like the presentation.

Shellban• 1 month ago

It looks decent on my 1920x1080p window running on a 4K monitor, but I have overlapping problems on my M1 Macbook.

Group_B• 1 month ago

Would love to see a write yo on nginx!

Lammy2• 1 month ago

IIS has a legacy behavior inherited from the old DOS 8.3 filename convention.

Is this exposing the underlying OS's behavior coupled with the fact that the IIS document root is `C:\Inetpub` by default? Eight-dot-three filenames are enabled by default on the C drive but disabled by default on all other drives on Windows 10/11:

  PS> (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion').DisplayVersion
  24H2

  PS> fsutil 8dot3name query C:
  The volume state is: 0 (8dot3 name creation is ENABLED)
  The registry state is: 2 (Per volume setting - the default)
  Based on the above settings, 8dot3 name creation is ENABLED on "C:"

  PS> fsutil 8dot3name query U:
  The volume state is: 1 (8dot3 name creation is DISABLED)
  The registry state is: 2 (Per volume setting - the default)
  Based on the above settings, 8dot3 name creation is DISABLED on "U:"

Terr_• 1 month ago

Tangentially, that reminds me of how a Windows update created c:\inetpub on everybody's non-server computers, to "increase protection" for unspecified reasons.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2684062/why-is-windows-11-la...

Lammy2• 1 month ago

to "increase protection" for unspecified reasons

Everything old is new again https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041116-00/?p=37... (2004)

mook• 1 month ago

That page eventually leads to the CVE page: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

While that's still pretty vague, it sounds like the issue was that something running as SYSTEM (the page seems to indicate some part of Windows Update) was not correctly checking if inetpub was a symlink or something along those lines. It also links to a script to set ACLs on that directory; presumably that's not possible to do if the directory doesn't exist.

It would probably be better to fix whatever component to not have the link traversal bug, but maybe there's some reason that makes the proper fix infeasible…

raesene92• 1 month ago

The original research for this is at https://soroush.me/downloadable/microsoft_iis_tilde_characte...

logifail• 1 month ago

PS> (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion').DisplayVersion 24H2

I got no response to that command on my W10 box, turns out for older (eg LTSC) versions it appears to need:

  (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion').ReleaseId
  1809

t1234s• 1 month ago

Does anyone use IIS anymore?

vlan0• 1 month ago

The entire solarwinds platform(barf)

qingcharles• 1 month ago

Yeah, I regularly speak to folks still running IIS on Windows Server. There are a lot of old apps out there, sadly. Some really, really important ones.

mpyne• 1 month ago

Tons of the Navy's public websites still run on it.

thedougd• 1 month ago

Amazingly some companies like Hyland still ship software that requires IIS. Bonus add are the pages and pages of setup instructions.

robotnikman• 1 month ago

And NCR from my experience.

pjmlp2• 1 month ago

Sitecore, Microsoft as two other examples.

Sitecore on the classical XP/XM stack, they don't seem to be bothered to update it to modern .NET, as the new products moved away from .NET (XM Cloud and co).

Microsoft still has stuff like Dynamics 365, running .NET Framework.

naturalmovement2• 1 month ago

Some banks still use IIS.

Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.

It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.

Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.

I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.

Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.

Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.

You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).

forkerenok• 1 month ago

Heyyy what's wrong with novel groupwise?

samplatt• 1 month ago

Way, WAY too many corporate IT divisions.

esikich• 1 month ago

Yes, but typically just internal corporate intraweb stuff from what I've seen.

AznHisoka• 1 month ago

A lot of big corps still use it.

https://bloomberry.com/data/windows-server/

jimt1234• 1 month ago

Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.

bitwize2• 1 month ago

That's the value add. Any dipshit can be trained in the Windows server stack, so you can staff your back office with dipshits. For a while in the early 2000s—before the cloud era—Windows was routinely found to have a lower TCO than Linux as a server OS for precisely this reason. More actual deployments too, especially in corporate intranets.

swarnie3• 1 month ago

I would say 75% of my webservers are IIS.

Nothing internet facing mind.

forgetfreeman4• 1 month ago

but...why?

formerly_proven• 1 month ago

The text uses target.com as a placeholder but they actually also have an IIS blue screen: https://knslsd.target.com/

dagaci• 1 month ago

IIS also sits at the back of a many "modern" cloud web type services.

sebazzz• 1 month ago

Yup, Windows Azure App Service is just IIS.

y2244• 1 month ago

Lots and lots

A lot of Microsoft devs know very little Linux historically as they used windows and are comfortable with it

Decreasing due to cloud and Nodejs takeup

catmanjan• 1 month ago

SharePoint uses it extensively

prussian• 1 month ago

I do. As others have replied, Windows Server--including IIS, means you have a domain joined machine, likely with an SPN of HOST/MACHINE.DOMAIN. Windows services and IIS App Pool Identities log in with an (g)MSA or virtual accounts (NT Service*) and you get a fully working and managed Kerberos experience without having to deal with 30, 60, 90 day password rotations. Log into your MS SQL Server with Kerberos, log into some other webapp's oauth2 flow with Kerberos, etc, it all just works. You can use WinRM with your native Windows shell without having to do anything special, and even technically bypass 2FA since that's just how it really works.

Can you do all this on Linux? Yes. Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.

zamalek• 1 month ago

with Kerberos, etc, it all just works

I worked with customer's AD environments in the 2010's and I remember whiteboards of figuring out customer Kerberos config. "it all just works" is not my recollection of that 3-headed beast lmao.

bartnp• 1 month ago

Yep.

And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?

Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.

chainingsolid• 1 month ago

I've seen it used to deliver 'apps' that 90% of a business's employees use. (EX: Met/Team) in the Metrology (calibration) space.

pjmlp2• 1 month ago

Yes, plenty of Microsoft shops still depend on .NET Framework based applications, or even classical ASP.

For modern .NET no one is really using IIS any longer.

NooneAtAll3• 1 month ago

what's the deal with left sidebar overlapping the main text?

kahf56• 1 month ago

good entertainment

xmcp123• 1 month ago

Oh man this takes me back.

Once upon a time, all server logs were basically unusable because of the amount of IIS scanners out there. There was a directory traversal that was literally just url encoding “../“ that absolutely lit the internet on fire for many months.

0x1d72• 1 month ago

Those traversal attempts are still very common, right next to the PHP/WordPress script kiddie attacks.

dpoloncsak• 1 month ago

"The White Noise of the Internet" as they call it

RetroTechie• 1 month ago

Wondering how far back that goes.. Win95 still vulnerable?

(Edit: I mean active attempts to exploit in the wild)

Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time

Related Stories