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What if I told you... that you could run a website from behind Cloudflare and only have 385 daily requests miss their cache and go through to the origin service?
No biggy, unless... that was out of a total of more than 166M requests in the same period:
Yep, we just hit "five nines" of cache hit ratio on Pwned Passwords being 99.999%. Actually, it was 99.9998% but we're at the point now where that's just splitting hairs, let's talk about how we've managed to only have two requests in a million hit the origin, beginning with a bit of history:
Optimising Caching on Pwned Passwords (with Workers)- @troyhunt - https://t.co/KjBtCwmhmT pic.twitter.com/BSfJbWyxMy
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) August 9, 2018
Ah, memories 😊 Back then, Pwned Passwords was serving way fewer requests in a month than what we do in a day now and the cache hit ratio was somewhere around 92%. Put another way, instead of 2 in every million requests hitting the origin it was 85k. And we were happy with that! As the years progressed, the traffic grew and the caching model was optimised so our stats improved:
There it is - Pwned Passwords is now doing north of 2 *billion* requests a month, peaking at 91.59M in a day with a cache-hit ratio of 99.52%. All free, open source and out there for the community to do good with 😊 pic.twitter.com/DSJOjb2CxZ
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) May 24, 2022
And that's pretty much where we levelled out, at about the 99-and-a-bit percent mark. We were really happy with that as it was now only 5k requests per million hitting the origin. There was bound to be a number somewhere around that mark due to the transient nature of cache and eviction criteria inevitably meaning a Cloudflare edge node somewhere would need to reach back to the origin website and pull a new copy of the data. But what if Cloudflare never had to do that unless explicitly instructed to do so? I mean, what if it just stayed in their cache unless we actually changed the source file and told them to update their version? Welcome to Cloudflare Cache Reserve:
Ok, so I may have annotated the important bit but that's what it feels like - magic - because you just turn it on and... that's it. You still serve your content the same way, you still need the appropriate cache headers and you still have the same tiered caching as before, but now there's a "cache reserve" sitting between that and your origin. It's backed by R2 which is their persistent data store and you can keep your cached things there for as long as you want. However, per the earlier link, it's not free:
You pay based on how much you store for how long, how much you write and how much you read. Let's put that in real terms and just as a brief refresher (longer version here), remember that Pwned Passwords is essentially just 16^5 (just over 1 million) text files of about 30kb each for the SHA-1 hashes and a similar number for the NTLM ones (albeit slight smaller file sizes). Here are the Cache Reserve usage stats for the last 9 days:
We can now do some pretty simple maths with that and working on the assumption of 9 days, here's what we get:
2 bucks a day 😲 But this has taken nearly 16M requests off my origin service over this period of time so I haven't paid for the Azure Function execution (which is cheap) nor the egress bandwidth (which is not cheap). But why are there only 16M read operations over 9 days when earlier we saw 167M requests to the API in a single day? Because if you scroll back up to the "insert magic here" diagram, Cache Reserve is only a fallback position and most requests (i.e. 99.52% of them) are still served from the edge caches.
Note also that there are nearly 1M write operations and there are 2 reasons for this:
An untold number of businesses rely on Pwned Passwords as an integral part of their registration, login and password reset flows. Seriously, the number is "untold" because we have no idea who's actually using it, we just know the service got hit three and a quarter billion times in the last 30 days:
Giving consumers of the service confidence that not only is it highly resilient, but also massively fast is essential to adoption. In turn, more adoption helps drive better password practices, less account takeovers and more smiles all round 😊
As those remaining hash prefixes populate Cache Reserve, keep an eye on the "cf-cache-status" response header. If you ever see a value of "MISS" then congratulations, you're literally one in a million!
Full disclosure: Cloudflare provides services to HIBP for free and they helped in getting Cache Reserve up and running. However, they had no idea I was writing this blog post and reading it live in its entirety is the first anyone there has seen it. Surprise! 👋
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International law enforcement agencies have claimed another victory over cyber criminals, after seizing the website, and taking down the infrastructure operated by crims linked to the NetWire remote access trojan (RAT).…
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Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the fourth quarter of 2022 closed with 350.4 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 0.5 million domain name registrations, or 0.1%, compared to the third quarter of 2022.1,2 Domain name registrations have increased by 8.7 million, or 2.6%, year over year.1,2
Check out the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief to see domain name stats from the fourth quarter of 2022, including:
• Top 10 Largest TLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• Top 10 Largest ccTLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• ngTLDs as Percentage of Total TLDs
• Geographical ngTLDs as Percentage of Total Corresponding Geographical TLDs
To see past issues of The Domain Name Industry Brief, please visit https://verisign.com/dnibarchives.
The post Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief: 350.4 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Fourth Quarter of 2022 appeared first on Verisign Blog.
A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While the defendant in this case hasn’t yet been named publicly, the NetWire website has been leaking information about the likely true identity and location of its owner for the past 11 years.
Typically installed by booby-trapped Microsoft Office documents and distributed via email, NetWire is a multi-platform threat that is capable of targeting not only Microsoft Windows machines but also Android, Linux and Mac systems.
NetWire’s reliability and relatively low cost ($80-$140 depending on features) has made it an extremely popular RAT on the cybercrime forums for years, and NetWire infections consistently rank among the top 10 most active RATs in use.
NetWire has been sold openly on the same website since 2012: worldwiredlabs[.]com. That website now features a seizure notice from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which says the domain was taken as part of “a coordinated law enforcement action taken against the NetWire Remote Access Trojan.”
“As part of this week’s law enforcement action, authorities in Croatia on Tuesday arrested a Croatian national who allegedly was the administrator of the website,” reads a statement by the DOJ today. “This defendant will be prosecuted by Croatian authorities. Additionally, law enforcement in Switzerland on Tuesday seized the computer server hosting the NetWire RAT infrastructure.”
Neither the DOJ’s statement nor a press release on the operation published by Croatian authorities mentioned the name of the accused. But it’s fairly remarkable that it has taken so long for authorities in the United States and elsewhere to move against NetWire and its alleged proprietor, given that the RAT’s author apparently did very little to hide his real-life identity.
The WorldWiredLabs website first came online in February 2012 using a dedicated host with no other domains. The site’s true WHOIS registration records have always been hidden by privacy protection services, but there are plenty of clues in historical Domain Name System (DNS) records for WorldWiredLabs that point in the same direction.
In October 2012, the WorldWiredLabs domain moved to another dedicated server at the Internet address 198.91.90.7, which was home to just one other domain: printschoolmedia[.]org, also registered in 2012.
According to DomainTools.com, printschoolmedia[.]org was registered to a Mario Zanko in Zapresic, Croatia, and to the email address zankomario@gmail.com. DomainTools further shows this email address was used to register one other domain in 2012: wwlabshosting[.]com, also registered to Mario Zanko from Croatia.
A review of DNS records for both printschoolmedia[.]org and wwlabshosting[.]com shows that while these domains were online they both used the DNS name server ns1.worldwiredlabs[.]com. No other domains have been recorded using that same name server.
The WorldWiredLabs website, in 2013. Source: Archive.org.
DNS records for worldwiredlabs[.]com also show the site forwarded incoming email to the address tommaloney@ruggedinbox.com. Constella Intelligence, a service that indexes information exposed by public database leaks, shows this email address was used to register an account at the clothing retailer romwe.com, using the password “123456xx.”
Running a reverse search on this password in Constella Intelligence shows there are more than 450 email addresses known to have used this credential, and two of those are zankomario@gmail.com and zankomario@yahoo.com.
A search on zankomario@gmail.com in Skype returns three results, including the account name “Netwire” and the username “Dugidox,” and another for a Mario Zanko (username zanko.mario).
Dugidox corresponds to the hacker handle most frequently associated with NetWire sales and support discussion threads on multiple cybercrime forums over the years.
Constella ties dugidox@gmail.com to a number of website registrations, including the Dugidox handle on BlackHatWorld and HackForums, and to IP addresses in Croatia for both. Constella also shows the email address zankomario@gmail.com used the password “dugidox2407.”
In 2010, someone using the email address dugidox@gmail.com registered the domain dugidox[.]com. The WHOIS registration records for that domain list a “Senela Eanko” as the registrant, but the address used was the same street address in Zapresic that appears in the WHOIS records for printschoolmedia[.]org, which is registered in Mr. Zanco’s name.
Prior to the demise of Google+, the email address dugidox@gmail.com mapped to an account with the nickname “Netwire wwl.” The dugidox email also was tied to a Facebook account (mario.zanko3), which featured check-ins and photos from various places in Croatia.
That Facebook profile is no longer active, but back in January 2017, the administrator of WorldWiredLabs posted that he was considering adding certain Android mobile functionality to his service. Three days after that, the Mario.Zank3 profile posted a photo saying he was selected for an Android instruction course — with his dugidox email in the photo, naturally.
Incorporation records from the U.K.’s Companies House show that in 2017 Mr. Zanko became an officer in a company called Godbex Solutions LTD. A Youtube video invoking this corporate name describes Godbex as a “next generation platform” for exchanging gold and cryptocurrencies.
The U.K. Companies House records show Godbex was dissolved in 2020. It also says Mr. Zanko was born in July 1983, and lists his occupation as “electrical engineer.”
Mr. Zanko did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A statement from the Croatian police about the NetWire takedown is here.
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The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta, which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.
Freenom’s website features a message saying it is not currently allowing new registrations.
Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau.
Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, presumably as a way to encourage users to pay for related services, such as registering a .com or .net domain, for which Freenom does charge a fee.
On March 3, 2023, social media giant Meta sued Freenom in a Northern California court, alleging cybersquatting violations and trademark infringement. The lawsuit also seeks information about the identities of 20 different “John Does” — Freenom customers that Meta says have been particularly active in phishing attacks against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users.
The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
“The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers’ identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes,” the complaint charges. “Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers.”
Meta further alleges that “Freenom has repeatedly failed to take appropriate steps to investigate and respond appropriately to reports of abuse,” and that it monetizes the traffic from infringing domains by reselling them and by adding “parking pages” that redirect visitors to other commercial websites, websites with pornographic content, and websites used for malicious activity like phishing.
Freenom has not yet responded to requests for comment. But attempts to register a domain through the company’s website as of publication time generated an error message that reads:
“Because of technical issues the Freenom application for new registrations is temporarily out-of-order. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. We are working on a solution and hope to resume operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding.”
Image: Interisle Consulting Group, Phishing Landscape 2021, Sept. 2021.
Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit are incorporated in the United States.
Meta initially filed this lawsuit in December 2022, but it asked the court to seal the case, which would have restricted public access to court documents in the dispute. That request was denied, and Meta amended and re-filed the lawsuit last week.
According to Meta, this isn’t just a case of another domain name registrar ignoring abuse complaints because it’s bad for business. The lawsuit alleges that the owners of Freenom “are part of a web of companies created to facilitate cybersquatting, all for the benefit of Freenom.”
“On information and belief, one or more of the ccTLD Service Providers, ID Shield, Yoursafe, Freedom Registry, Fintag, Cervesia, VTL, Joost Zuurbier Management Services B.V., and Doe Defendants were created to hide assets, ensure unlawful activity including cybersquatting and phishing goes undetected, and to further the goals of Freenom,” Meta charged.
It remains unclear why Freenom has stopped allowing domain registration. In June 2015, ICANN suspended Freenom’s ability to create new domain names or initiate inbound transfers of domain names for 90 days. According to Meta, the suspension was premised on ICANN’s determination that Freenom “has engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking in or use of domain names identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark of a third party in which the Registered Name Holder has no rights or legitimate interest.”
A spokesperson for ICANN said the organization has no insight as to why Freenom might have stopped registering domain names. But it said Freenom (d/b/a OpenTLD B.V.) also received formal enforcement notices from ICANN in 2017 and 2020 for violating different obligations.
A copy of the amended complaint against Freenom, et. al, is available here (PDF).
March 8, 6:11 p.m. ET: Updated story with response from ICANN. Corrected attribution of the domain abuse report.
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