When I was first poking around with Tor, I wondered how many of the "Get guns in Europe", "Hard Drugs here", "Credit Card Numbers for sale" and such links were honeypots. Luckily, not being interested in any of those things, I didn't have to find out.
Most of the legit stuff was on telegram, surprisingly or not. I know people who bought uh firearms and more there. Unfortunately, it feels like it disappeared at the same time as the proximity feature
When I was younger I tried to buy a gun on one of those sites for a planned shooting but it just resulted in me losing my money and not any law enforcement action
I'm not expressly trying to block trackers; I'm just trying to find a web browser that doesn't eat all my RAM, and WebKit seems to be the best engine for it, but I don't use Apple's hardware, so I end up with some pretty oddball browsers, which also send out less tracking information.
Of course, using an oddball browser in and of itself is easily trackable, but that's not what the bot-detection software is looking for, so it defaults to assuming I'm a bot.
You don’t need PII to prove you are not a robot. See Privacy Pass. And I don’t know how a website is somehow going to verify your PII as not-fake, anyway.
How a website is going to identify your PI as non-fake? Isn't that the entire business model behind Persona which has been in the news for leaks? (There are a few websites I've had to verify my if I with them for)
Is it a honeypot, or does it just look like a honeypot? And if it just looks like a honeypot, isn't that a honeypot? or if it looks like a honeypot that isn't a honeypot does that mean it's the actual thing?
I assume the word is in there for the sake of people who don't know what a honeypot is. It gets them curious that law enforcement set up something fake, even if they don't immediately know what it is for.
Yes, this surprised me as well. Credit card and Paypal information should give the police everything they need to identify the criminal (in a way that's much more simple and reliable than via IP address, which may be obfuscated via a VPN or similar). Why not take it, it's free?
Oh I think I did something similar by chance. I was seeing which websites were associated with some entities, and I found the ones of the Italian defense ministry. In italian defense is "difesa". I found one that had "bifesa" in the link, and when opened told me that I had to be more careful to links I open because it could have been a dangerous website. Flash forward to a year later and it didn't work anymore
Sounds like something used by phishing awareness training. If so, then presumably it didn’t work anymore because they ended that or use a different one.
"I guess they saw my email address that greeted them. They probably received logs of someone "falling for it", and saw someone was poking around their secret website, and knew who was behind it. They completely panicked."
I doubt it. I think the author of this page is giving himself way too much credit. The only evidence that anyone "panicked" is the author's own statements that they must have. More likely someone put in a WAF rule that 401'd for his IP.
"By running these honeypots, the police create suspicion and paranoia in the community. If you want to buy a DDoS attack, you now have to wonder if the website is real or just a police honeypot logging your IP. They want people to stop trusting these services entirely."
Well, good, right? What "community" is this diabolical suspicion and paranoia being created in? The community kids who want to DDoS some other kids' game servers? OK, again, that's good, right?
"But it really just feels more like feds jerking themselves off on how cool they are."
Pot, kettle.
"Does this video and the honeypot have any real impact? Let's be honest: probably not."
How does the author know? According to Wikipedia, the larger operation has shut down 4 dozen sites offering DDoS services.
Sure, gov't is often clueless and maybe this is effective or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's an experiment. Maybe it's actually intercepted a fair number of potential customers.
If clueless teens are signing up for booters and it's actually LEO who contacts them and says "you know, that's illegal" then that's a good thing.
I dunno, if they got ID #15, and the site shut down immediately after (for everyone), it doesn’t seem like a crazy stretch.
Like, if a page gets hundreds of thousands of visitors, then your assumption is reasonable. For a page that might get dozens of visitors over its lifetime, it’s a much less certain assumption
It's unlikely in my opinion as someone that maintains a lot of websites, because it's long odds that I'm even at my desk at any given time, let alone monitoring and panicking over what visitors are clicking on.
Is it possible that it happened that way? Sure. But it's more likely that it didn't.
Do you run any honeypots? You realise the point of a honeypot is, unlike a normal website, to monitor exactly what visitors are clicking on so the trapper can react?
They were supposed to shut down after #12 but they got busy, then had to take that day off to get the kids to the doctor and it fell to the wayside. Eventually, the notification for #15 arrived and the dev panicked that it should have gone down weeks ago.
Stress testing your own site like the article shows isn't criminal intent. There is legitimate market demand to understand if a service you are running can properly withstand and filter out either large mounts of legitimate and illegitimate traffic.
There might be too much friction to get someone working for a site to be able to prove it which will reduce sales. It's simpler to just use the legal system to enforce it by putting it in the terms of service.
I mean what makes a ddos service legitimate? Plus security is an endless cat and mouse game and asking the cat what the best way to catch a mouse is may not reveal the same information as asking the mouse how they evade the cat.
Coming back to point out cloudflare is probably the most common way of hiding your servers ip if you are running a greyzone or illegal service, and its useful for running many websites on the same VPS without reverse DNS busting you
Sure but that has nothing to do with turnstile. You turn those on when you're site is getting hammered by bots, which seems odd for that particular site.
> Does this video and the honeypot have any real impact? Let's be honest: probably not. It feels like they are just redistributing wealth from the average taxpayer to AI video slop corporations.
I feel like this describes roughly 75% of all government initiatives.
Of course not, it seems a rare thing that politicians are chose based on knowledge or merit. Spewing bullcrap, shitting money, kissing rings, those are all great ways to become a politician, but they are horrible ways to direct and manage policy and insulates those people from how the world actually functions. And the only punishment for doing an absolutely horrible job is they MIGHT have to find another job years down the road.
I'm not a teenager anymore but I thoroughly enjoyed it, a lot better than some random dev breathlessly talking about how they haven't written a line of code in 6 months, or an article talking about how LLMs lead to the end of programming/the economy/the world, etc etc.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
Of course, using an oddball browser in and of itself is easily trackable, but that's not what the bot-detection software is looking for, so it defaults to assuming I'm a bot.
Likely you just use a shit web browser.
cloudflare browser run, superb. no captcha.
i can let opencode merrily browse the web and it doesn't get stopped. a bit like a drug mule bribing the cops.
every time there is a captcha it makes you authenticate. so it's the same thing as the captcha.
maybe i have it misconfigured
Is it a honeypot, or does it just look like a honeypot? And if it just looks like a honeypot, isn't that a honeypot? or if it looks like a honeypot that isn't a honeypot does that mean it's the actual thing?
The lack of even taking your payment details makes it look either fake, as in still being built or built as a demo, or not being a serious operation.
Why not take their Bitcoin though… maybe they might be building other cases or something
I doubt it. I think the author of this page is giving himself way too much credit. The only evidence that anyone "panicked" is the author's own statements that they must have. More likely someone put in a WAF rule that 401'd for his IP.
"By running these honeypots, the police create suspicion and paranoia in the community. If you want to buy a DDoS attack, you now have to wonder if the website is real or just a police honeypot logging your IP. They want people to stop trusting these services entirely."
Well, good, right? What "community" is this diabolical suspicion and paranoia being created in? The community kids who want to DDoS some other kids' game servers? OK, again, that's good, right?
"But it really just feels more like feds jerking themselves off on how cool they are."
Pot, kettle.
"Does this video and the honeypot have any real impact? Let's be honest: probably not."
How does the author know? According to Wikipedia, the larger operation has shut down 4 dozen sites offering DDoS services.
Sure, gov't is often clueless and maybe this is effective or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's an experiment. Maybe it's actually intercepted a fair number of potential customers.
If clueless teens are signing up for booters and it's actually LEO who contacts them and says "you know, that's illegal" then that's a good thing.
Why make this assumption when you could just visit the website yourself and see the same 401?
The reasonable assumption to make when something changes that it had nothing to do with me. Because 99.99999% of the time, it didn't.
Like, if a page gets hundreds of thousands of visitors, then your assumption is reasonable. For a page that might get dozens of visitors over its lifetime, it’s a much less certain assumption
Is it possible that it happened that way? Sure. But it's more likely that it didn't.
Is een nep-honeypot ... echt?
Forgive my pedantry.
Genuinely asking if anyone recalls this being in an HN in the last two yearsish.
I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their stresser honeypot
How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging
I feel like this describes roughly 75% of all government initiatives.
I, too, hate it when people discuss hacking on my Claude News homepage.