Aaron Soto

@surefire@infosec.exchange
175 Followers
516 Following
6K Posts

Teaching was my first love. Packets were my second.

I make classes to teach people how to defend themselves against hackers. In my spare time, I teach college students to compete in cybersecurity competitions, or try to take back my home automation from the cloud.

he/him đŸŗī¸â€đŸŒˆ â¤ī¸đŸ’œđŸ’™

(Profile banner is a sunset sky from underneath a bridge with kayakers and the edge of the Austin city skyline)

Twitter@_surefire_
Githubhttps://github.com/sure-fire
so recently my server has unintentionally been inside a DDoS of my own making. any smaller webserver i point my domain at becomes instantly crippled. let me explain the situation...

so i make minecraft mods, right. well, at one point, i made this library mod called CICADA, that has a bunch of shared utilities i use. this is pretty common practice

then once i had that, i realized, hey! why not make a funny thing in this library mod that gives my own minecraft character a cape when anyone sees me! that would be kinda neat.

it couldnt just be simply hardcoded though of course, so i had a genius plan. i would put a simple "api" of sorts up on github pages that would have directories for all the players that i want to have capes. the mod can do a quick http request in the background, and if it doesnt return a 404, load the cape from the png thats returned to display on the player

now you might wonder, this is a perfect idea is it not? how could this possibly have caused any issues? ...yea i think you can roughly guess where this went

for the github pages thing, i used the one domain i had available at the time:
enjarai.dev. now, you may notice that this currently hosts my personal website. which is no longer on github pages.

when i made this migration, i realized something quite concerning. my mods are
popular.

my servers cpu was consistently pinned at 100% over 4 cores, and i was getting...
checks notes thousands of GET requests a second. 24/7. neither me nor my server were very happy about this as you might imagine

for quite a while, i've honestly just kinda... put up with this. there didnt seem to be anything i could do, short of just not using my domain or migrating back to github, neither of which i wanted

its been getting worse and worse though, my disk is filling up with access logs within literal hours after clearing them (so i had to disable those) and im running out of bandwidth quota on my VPS every month. something needs to change

so i shared my problem with a bunch of friends last night, and we brainstormed the hell out of this. after a lot of ideas, including potentially sending malformed PNGs to crash people's games and force them to update the mod (which turned out not to be feasible), i landed on a pretty decent solution i think

everyone using an old version of CICADA will now see this cape. on every single player

i really hope this works, cause if not, im kinda out of ideas

will keep yall posted
What could you use more of right now?
peace & quiet
hope & happiness
curly fries & cash
deep sleep
Poll ends at .

I was mulling over a principle of incident response today and wondered what others in my field might think.

Yes or no: "To operate effectively, incident responders need to be able to obtain at least the same level of access to a system as the attacker has potentially obtained."

Astronaut snaps giant red 'jellyfish' sprite over North America during upward-shooting lightning event

NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured an electrifying image of a giant lightning "sprite" shooting up over Mexico and southern U.S. states. The red "jellyfish" could help researchers learn more about this rare phenomenon.

Live Science
Thunderstorms đŸŒŠī¸
Hate them
5.4%
Love them
76.6%
Ambivalent
18%
Poll ended at .

This card showed up in my YouTube feed today. It look really good. This video shows it off well. I am looking forward to testing Bubble Card and see if it meets my needs.

https://youtu.be/0hSQOlBxKKI?si=K_h3lI7uTWD8A3Rl

https://github.com/Clooos/Bubble-Card

#bubblecard

#HomeAssistant

@homeassistant @homeassistant@lemmy.world @homeassistant@a.gup.pe @homeassistant

Bubble Card for Home Assistant - Introduction

YouTube
Wouldn't it be nice if when the government demanded the arrest of 83-year-old peace protesters, the police said they didn't have any officers available like they do when your house is burgled?

Which search engine do you use in place of Google? No dogmatic discussions, please. Just the name and a link to inform me and my followers about your preferred alternative.

Once again. No. Discussions. Or. Statements. Just. The. Name. And. Link.

#homeassistant only allows one Sun. What if my home planet has more?
Chandler Sobel-Sorenson of the University of Arizona Genomics Institute decided to triple down on his rudeness this morning, so he has earned the honor of being publicly named and shamed.
His previous two rude emails were sent to me from his work email address, Chandler@genome.arizona.edu, but apparently he thought it unwise to send an overtly abusive email from that address, so this morning he sent me the abusive message below from his private email, scar@riseup.net.
#FOSS #NameAndShame
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It was time to meander home in Harry. Spotted a Starlet on the drive.

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