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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 9th, 2024

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  • Funny, we get more complaints about DuckDuckGo browser than anything else, and that’s one of the few we don’t test on. I know this because I make it a point to have someone from CS tell me about consistent pain points users are having. I wonder how many complaints about Firefox not working your customer service team is getting daily and you just don’t hear about it because they’ve been told to tell users “just say Firefox isn’t a supported browser and to try installing Chrome.”

    You should ask someone in CS. Whichever agent bullshits the least (not the manager) - you might learn something.

    Almost 3/10 people accessing your sites are using Firefox. All those “images not loading right or whatever” are probably blatant to them, making them think “wow, what an absolute shit website.”

    3 out of 10.




  • Sucks that I have to preface but people can be jumpy here. This is genuine curiosity, I’m actually asking, because it’s really probably something I should already know. Can you explain the nuance to me please?


    My understanding, speaking mostly of apps/websites, I know jobs can be much different:

    Most places have the first factor as a password.

    First factor (or “login”) = username+password pair.

    For the longest time that was all there was, “your login” was just a login, which meant a username and password combination. Then 2FA/MFA (“2 factor authentication / multi-factor authentication”) came along in the form of username+password combo plus SMS/email/Google Authenticator/Yubikey/etc to verify as the 2nd form of authentication. You can have 3FA 4FA 5FA whatever if you want and if it’s supported by the app/website. So 2FA is MFA, but MFA is not necessarily 2FA.

    I know jobs can be set up a lot differently.



  • At that point its out of your hands. Once the users have fully decided only one browser is all they’re going to use, because most websites only develop for that browser (gee sound familiar?) then whoever owns that browser owns the web. That’s the point people are trying to get you to understand and you aren’t getting.

    its not like we wont notice a shift like that. It would be very easy to adapt

    This has has happened before. It took over a decade to get people to start using other browsers. Your little company can’t wave a magic wand and make the entire internet ecosystem shift, even though you were part of the cause.

    Firefox market share is going up. But because small vendors not testing on it, it’s preventing its adoption. So you’re letting Google own the web.












  • Friendly reminder that Bluetooth has a larger network stack than Wi-Fi. Much more code, much larger available attack base. There have been many numerous Bluetooth vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution or theft of files.

    This is truly becoming a surveillance state, in no way that can be debated. That want to be able to access everyone’s innermost thoughts (texts, notes, recordings, calendars, contacts, photos, you get it) without any chance of someone being able to protect against it.

    Reminder that Google was the 2nd or 3rd company to commit to NSA’s PRISM program of feeding American’s data for future analysis.


  • What guarantees do you have that Malus doesn’t copy your key to their cloud?

    I remember when I used a Samsung Galaxy as by daily driver a couple years back. I enabled full disk encryption and thought okay great, now that’s done. I noticed a very small, brief popup on my screen that lasted a few seconds, and it was a notice that my key had been sent to Samsung servers. Apparently you have to disable that option that’s hurried deep in the settings somewhere no one would think to look, and change your password again. If I hadn’t caught that brief notification at the bottom of the screen (not the normal location for notifications), I’d never have known.

    The encryption password is also a max of 15 characters.


  • Thank you for doing the work. More of it needs to be done. I don’t know what your workflow is, but running Android-x86 and injecting into the virtualbox networking process to strip the SSL should still work, unless the app uses certificate pinning. I wish I remembered the name of the program, but it’s specifically for injecting into a running exe and hooking all network calls to pull ALL network data from that specific app. It’s not Fiddler or Wireshark or any of those. Fiddler and wireshark will work fine if you add your self-signed cert to the Android CA list, as long as certificate pinning isn’t used in the app. You can point wireshark to the virtualbox network adapter so it doesn’t listen on your other adapters. Also, most apps in the app store, play store, and F-Droid likely will not have much maliciousness. Play Store has the highest chance. But I think you’ll have better luck using all the major search engines and searching for “free VPN android” without any adblockers, using an android phone (Google & co easily detect user-agent manipulation) running chroming. Making note of all the paid ads, and then getting the first 10 pages of URLs, and then comb those links (all the ad links & result links) and download any .apk that shows up. Keep an eye out for more ads on those pages as well. Use a fresh android-x86 for each analyzed VPN apk.

    There may be a better, easier way, but this was how I quickly analyzed the network data of android malware as of a few years ago.

    Edit: other keywords to find shady vpns are ads for things like “watch porn in Utah” and “express VPN”, " nord VPN", etc. You’ll want to do the search within android as Google and Bing will allow the malvertisers to target specific operating systems, along with locations and other variables.

    Also for checking into the servers that show up, and any interesting domains, you can use shodan and similar tools, and there is a great site (name escapes me now, similar to domaintools and urlscan.io though) that shows what domains run on certain IP addresses and also the owners and creation dates, although cloudflare and private whois entries make those less useful today. But that will potentially allow you to unmask ‘networks’ of shady free VPN providers.


  • That seems to be the case, probably a killswitch-type feature, ensuring the VPN is working. Additionally, addr[.]cx is a free GeoIP lookup service, and I assume bigbrolook (OP - Big Brother is a term for a surveillance state, the porn definition is only used for 5-10 years) is/was another one. You can confirm with waybackmachine.

    Seems to be an amateur free VPN using free infrastructure. Most of the time the free VPNs that turn their users machines into a proxy or do other dirty things will be obfuscated and require at least a bit of reverse engineering, not just opening a debugger and peeking.

    Not trying to cast shade here, but isn’t a master’s thesis after you know a subject incredibly well, and aren’t you supposed to look at things no one has looked at before? In case you’re not in tech and this is a master’s for another subject, this has been done.