Found the error Not allowed to load local resource: file:///etc/passwd while looking at infosec.pub’s communities page. There’s a community called “ignore me” that adds a few image tags trying to steal your passwd file.

You have to be extremely poorly configured for this to work, but the red flags you see should keep you on your toes for the red flags you don’t.

22 points
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Is this, by any chance, originated from the sub called ignore? In that case is probably my bad because is set as the image of the channel. (I was playing with lemmy in the previous version and forgot about it, sorry. It will not work since your browser can’t access local file that easily without breaking the sandbox :))

Edit: I removed it so you shouldn’t see the alert anymore. What I wasn’t expecting is that apparently every sub is loaded even if you don’t visit it.

/cc @shellsharks@infosec.pub

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4 points

But… why? Why even put that URL there? Even if it was most likely harmless for all users, this still looks like an attempt at data exfiltration.

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6 points

Because I wanted to try if others URI schemas were supported instead of http / https. file:// was a valid one. Don’t worry, the day an attempt of data exfil will happen, you will not see it though your console logs.

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3 points

I doubt this person ever expected anyone to find it or to read that much into it lol

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21 points

If you find something, report it. Don’t experiment on the public.

https://www.bugcrowd.com/resources/guide/what-is-responsible-disclosure/

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2 points

My first thought was that a Javascript library pulled from a CDN got spiked.

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1 point

That harmless self retweeting tweet was pretty funny though

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10 points

Holy shit this is kind of unsettling. Though I would expect ALL major browsers to reject reading any local files like this… would this kind of thing actually succeed somewhere/somehow?

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5 points

If you ran your browser as root and configured your browser to load local resources on non-local domains maybe. I think you can do that in chrome://flags but you have to explicitly list the domains allowed to do it.

I’m hoping this is just a bad joke.

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2 points

you don’t need to be root to read /etc/passwd

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4 points

That’s because passwd doesn’t store the password hashes. Just user names.

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3 points
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Are you sure? What do you get when you run $ cat /etc/passwd in terminal? Just paste the results here 😇

Edit: to anyone reading this on the future, don’t actually do this, it was a joke

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[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

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0 points

Yeah, seems highly unlikely to ever yield any results. Even if you did manage to read a file, you have to get lucky finding a password hash in a rainbow table or the password being shit enough to crack.

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1 point

I cracked the BMC on my workstation motherboard by binwalking the publicly available firmware and finding, to my delight and dread, that the built in root user password was laughably weak. If a top5 motherboard manufacturer is still doing shit like that, users are too.

I also work in support and have seen first hand the bananas things people do, even smart people that should know better

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1 point

Also generally the actual password (or rather its hash) is stored in /etc/shadow on most systems from the past 20 odd years.

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7 points
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Can confirm it’s still there for the ignore me community.

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1 point

I’ve had around 20 of ‘lol exploit’ queries in my instance. Luckily none of them succeeded.

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