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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You’re pretty well on the right track. It might help if I explain what the attack is doing more. So an attacker starting out knows nothing about you or even where you are. So they need to figure these things out. The most optimal way to do this is by scanning everything and I do mean everything. There are automated scans that get information on literally everything that is open on the web. An unconfigured device that’s capable of ssh can get hit with login attempts after just 30 seconds of being plugged in. So first they try to find someone and let’s say by random they get you, they don’t know who you are yet but they have an IP now. First they run scans to see what’s available, what services are internet capable and talking to anyone who asks. Once they know what services they will do banner grabbing to try to find out specifics about the service like version number. Once they have this information they can dig for more or look for vulnerabilities specific to that service and version. Metasploit will actually tell you which attacks work for the version numbers you’ve discovered, pretty handy. If they decide to proceed they send the correct exploit to you computer and bam they’re in to do whatever. If you’re running something out of date there are usually vulnerabilities that just will allow access to attackers, this is why updating is important.

    Security through obscurity first relies on not being seen in the first place whether through not connecting to much or being something no one cares about hacking in the first place. Second it relies on being uncommon enough to not have a bunch of known vulnerabilities. A random GitHub program with 10k downloads is going to have a lot less known vulnerabilities than Microsoft office. Third it relies on being so little known that even if someone can figure out how to hack in they won’t know what to do. Imagine trying to find important documents on someone’s heavily customized Linux box as opposed to a Windows box.

    Tldr: security through obscurity is first hoping you don’t get seen then hoping if you are seen that they don’t care. It’s not good security but it might work.