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I was reminded of the great #Cisco security fix of 2019

#curl

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

alt text mentions 404 error but screenshot shows 403, i guess that's a mistake?
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

This is ofcourse going the obvious solution when your blog's "network engineer" tag is filled with PR BS:

CW: everything on this blog is bullshit, and unrelated to what the tag name is

https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/network-engineer

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

This is sorta what imgur does for wget as well, to "stop" scraping I guess...

(it has returned 429 "too many requests" every time I've tried, so I assumme it's an ingress rule for the user agent)

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

I looked up the curl man page, especially the example for changing the user agent:

Example:
curl -A "Agent 007" https://example.com

😎

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

So many servers are happy when you just provide a trusted user-agent, and a referer. Sometimes one alao needs a token that can be obtaimed from an additional request.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

This should be the first hit on Google when searching for "imposter syndrome".
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

Could you just change the casing of the default curl user agent?
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

@briankrebs I’ve been selectively blocking all sorts of stuff on some servers like that.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

to buy cisco is just sick: expensive and you see the "quality" of their sophisticated "security" devices.
How can they play with their reputation like this...
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

If it just piped the offending IP address into the iptables drop list, it would be a good start. No reason to let your adversary know they can try again with different parameters.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

Same nonsense on https://dl.dell.com - the default user agents of curl and wget trigger a 403 error, but setting the user agent to a less suspicious string such as "bullshit" or "nmap" solves the problem.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

We won't let you hack into this device unless you ask *politely*! That will stop hackers because the evil in their hearts prevents them from being polite.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

Last time I checked supervisord's documentation website did the same, couldn't get an answer with curl until I try with another UA.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

this hit so close to home today ... been struggling with an infrastructure team having a basic auth protected service redirecting https to http. Gave then curl screenshots and their response was "we are not familiar with this 'curl' software, can you try it on Chrome or Edge?" 😔😒🤨
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

I posted this image on LinkedIn as well, and the stats there tells me that Cisco is in fact now the third most common employing company among the viewers... (only beaten by AWS and Microsoft)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielstenberg_curl-activity-7185597818894512130-kHFS

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

does this qualify as code bloat? the user agent header is completely arbitrary and can be set to anything.
I mean why single out curl. Shouldn’t the nmap default user agent be in there too? etc etc
in reply to spmatich :blobcoffee:

@spmatich they singled out curl because the exploit proof of concept used curl. They stopped the example command line from working.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

so the exploit just needs an update to include setting the user agent header to something else right, and it could be one of many many many different strings.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

This makes me want to add a check for curl as the user agent, but only so it sends back a fun message as part of the return headers. Something harmless.