Threat actor abuses Cloudflare tunnels to deliver remote access trojans
proofpoint.com
proofpoint.com
They also use the same VPNs for connecting to your machines as your grandparents do for watching Netflix.
The internet as a whole is slowly but steadily moving towards a model where IP addresses and domain names are not useful indicators for security. You can not block your users from visiting Cloudflare or AWS IP ranges and you can not block visitors to your site from major commercial VPN providers.
In addition, all the traffic is encrypted, name lookups are encrypted, so a network operator can not tell anything about what you are doing on the internet.
This is a good thing for multiple reasons. First, it improves privacy and anonymity for the internet users. Second, reducing the effectiveness of network security solutions will make us be able to phase out their usage, which makes the network dumb again and prevents ossification. And third, it forces us to tackle the underlying security issues, rather than supporting a whole industry of ineffective whack-a-mole.
Iam pretty sure reddit does. I recently needed to rewrite/patch my tumblog backend software that uses yt-dlp to download reddit videos because reddit blocked the ip ranges of hetzners dedicated servers.
I circumvented this by downloading the videos on the client via javascript and upload it to my server.
You can if you can figure out their IP ranges. Some websites already do it and it is something I am looking into.
Another thing worth doing is blocking TOR by getting the exit node ip address list. Blocking TOR has saved me a lot of grief from bad actors.
I guess that's a consequence of law enforcement being completely unable or unwilling to actually tackle online crime (as long as it's not inconveniencing a large corporation in very specific domains such as copyright).
Why bother with bulletproof/etc hosts or sketchy domain registrars when you can use a mainstream one and get away with it?
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to expect cloudflare to be policing their own service for malware when they're trying to pitch themselves as a security product.
At the same time, this is exactly some variation of the "random people have put malware on random internet locations" scare the GP was talking about. If "malware somewhere on the internet" is a problem, we have to fix what turns it into a problem, because we just won't fix this one.
Same. I think they're getting too big to care, or even to attempt to do so.
(note that I don't necessarily agree but that statement is loaded)
However, putting the responsibility to mitigate this problem in its entirety is very inefficient and ineffective. If Cloudflare would have a team dedicated for this effort, bad actors would simply switch providers, beating $200k/year effort by couple clicks.
Notice that the malware ultimately takes effect when the user executes the file.
This sounds more like an interaction design problem that should be solved in the OS level; the OS interface is one of the logistical bottleneck for the malware delivery path.
Large software companies seem to enjoy passing the buck in recent years if it might impact their profitability which is fine but to say the could not do anything about it incorrect. It may not be feasible to do so an still operate the service but that doesnt mean it isnt possible.
Either discontinue the service, or serve each pipe from a subdomain that encodes the original source. Something that lets security tooling block known bad sites, without having them block a lot of legitimate sites.
That said, they're also using the "utility argument" - just as your phone provider won't screen you at every call you make, your electricity provider won't lock your supply until you authenticate use for non-nefarious purposes , your ISP won't content-filter, Cloudflare also says they won't police per-use other than when under explicit legal mandate (court injunctions). That's fair enough, at least to me.
I hadn't heard of trycloudflare.com before, but it's blocked on my network for now. If I need to, I can re-evaluate that later.
Anyone running a service online can get caught off guard and be taken advantage of by scammers and assholes. It's an opportunity to shore up your security and monitoring. The bad actors will eventually move on to abuse easier targets and that's fine. When they do that doesn't invalidate the work someone put into making sure their service wasn't being repeatedly/routinely used to harm others.
We want service providers on the internet to police themselves and make sure that they're not turning a blind eye to crimes taking place right on their own servers because the alternative is that laws and regulation come into play. There's an argument that internet companies that are too big to block could still be negligent, an accessory to crimes, liable for the very real and significant damages the poor management of their service enabled just so that they could save a little money, etc.
Just like with banks, there are people who would say that if a company is too big to fail/be blocked then they are too big to exist and should be broken up.
Personally, I'd rather that a service provider just do a better job keeping their corner of the internet clean, keeping the people who use their services safer, and preventing their services/equipment/IP space from being used to carry out criminal acts. In the end it'd improve their service, improve their image, make the internet a safer place, and as a bonus it would force criminals to waste their time looking for the a new company who'll be too cheap/lazy to kick them off their services. Hopefully they'll eventually end up only being able to find ones that the rest of us feel we can block.
The abuse mechanism you describe exists in theory, but... commercial.
There is community between the NOCs of tier 1 ISPs, but they mainly care about routing.
In your picture, I'm imagining, say, CenturyLink stomping on a retail ISP, and I question whether this pans out like swatting. Can I get someone taken down by abusing abuse reports?
Not generally, no. Typically, abuse departments at ISPs don't blindly cut off people's internet access just because someone complains. They require evidence (server logs, message headers, etc) and there will be an investigation as well as multiple communications between an ISP and a user being accused of violating the ISP's terms of service. The same is true when the issue is between ISPs and their upstream providers. Keep in mind too that for both ISPs and upstream providers, everyone is naturally and strongly incentivized to not cancel the accounts of the customers who pay them.
There is one situation where false reports can get someone taken down. DMCA notices have this potential. ISPs can face billions in fines if they refuse to permanently disconnect their customers from the internet based on nothing more than unproven/unsubstantiated allegations made by third party vendors with a long history of sending wildly inaccurate DMCA notices. So far, media companies have been winning in courts and ISPs have been losing or (more often) settling outside of court. Everyone is still waiting to see how the case against Cox ends (https://torrentfreak.com/cox-requests-rehearing-of-piracy-ca...)
Here cloudflare is showing they should nt be trusted, but because they are so big, we can't act on that. Blocking them would be bad, mocking them is the second best option.
The consequences for Cloudflare and it's legitimate users might be anything but mild.
Say blocking any cloudflare domain or IP.
Many cuz ur into privacy or your parinoid....who cares why.
Anecdote: i've been an internet end user for 30-ish years, an active FOSS developer for most of that time (with no small amount of web dev), and have never once intentionally used CloudFlare (only indirectly, by visiting sites which use it). Not because i'm especially "into privacy or paranoid," but because it's never once been necessary.
And there is the problem. Too many sites are behind Cloudfare, so if you want to block Cloudfare for your organization, your employees will start complaining that the "internet doesn't work".
I have a small dedicated server with OVH that I use as a wireguard based VPN sometimes. The amount of sites that become unusable because of Cloudflare blocking me is insane. The inverse would be true if I blocked Cloudflare.
blocklists are effective and now we need things like DoH, 3rd-party dns providers and sketchy vpn's in order to internet
mission fucking accomplished
TLDs that are most commonly abused actually do get blocked on a regular basis.
.ru, .io, .xyz, .cf, .tk, .ly, .top and .link are common examples
Many corporate networks block URL shortener services for the same reason
Yes, .com has the highest absolute number of phishing domains, but it also has the overwhelmingly highest number of registered domains period. The relative prevalence is only 24.2, as compared with 2nd-ranked (by absolute score) .top, with a phishing domains core of 422.7. That's still not the highest listed, which is .lol at 577.5.
<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/phish-friendly-domain-re...>
If you're looking at relative benefit vs. harm from blocking, blocking TLDs with a higher relative (abusive vs. legitimate) domains score gives an additional security benefit.
Reputation-based scoring by TLD, domain, ASN, or basis is likely to become more prevalent over time. We've already been doing that for email for over a quarter century, with the Spamhaus Project being founded in 1998 (it reports abusive email domains).
But you can bet your ass we block newly registered domains and have an active list of domain reputations - your brand new .com or your axuuasck32213mczo.com malware domain isn't getting through any decent security tool.
If Cloudflare lets this continue, it's only a matter of time before trycloudflare.com's reputation puts them on block lists everywhere.
It wouldn't be an issue for trying it out if you don't block it yourself.
But you're right, these big money-making companies are such snowflakes that you have to have some compassion with them, right.
If you merely want to be edgy, then well done. Otherwise, a piece of advice, start by understanding the problem.
Cloudflare is enshittifying the Internet once again.
(I don't care if this gets downvoted by CF fans - not a single one will engage meaningfully about any point asserted here)
Scammers and assholes will always exist. It's the responsibility of everyone operating a service on the internet to make sure that their service isn't acting as a safe-haven for those criminals and bad actors.
Google is somehow worse than cloudflare is. I heard recently that Google won't even accept an abuse complaint for docs.google.com unless you create and sign into a google account.
It's not complicated.
Apocryphally saying "they all suck at this but Cloudflare sucks most" is just moaning. Any free/near-free hosting or caching service can be used to distribute malware. Mail services have been used to push malware for decades, and while many of them filter content, that's a cat&mouse game a determined malactor will occasionally win.
Are they really "so much worse" than anyone else ?
(ex-CF so pillory me for ex-cusing my ex-employer; as said, to me, "all cooks use water")
First, their abuse reporting page has issues. The amount of data allowed to be pasted is very limited and won't allow the full content of most spam. If you paste the full amount, you can't submit, and you won't know why - you have to go and remove some content. It's rate limited so that even a human reporting multiple items has to sit and wait. You're forced to provide a URL that points to Cloudflare servers, meaning there's no way to report abusive domains for which they're the registrar and/or for whom they host DNS. They have a CAPTCHA on the abuse reporting form. I could go on, but it's tedious.
This company spent YEARS saying that they don't "host" anything, and they still play games in that their abuse reporting doesn't reflect any of the offerings that've been added in the last several years. They don't even have a category for spam!
So yes, they are "so much worse" than anyone else. They actively skirt responsibility.
Yes there is: registrar-abuse@cloudflare.com
> This company spent YEARS saying that they don't "host" anything
Yes, for their "proxying" service, they take no action when it comes to that, all they will do is forward the report to the hosting provider.
> They don't even have a category for spam
Use the general category or abuse@cloudflare.com
> It's rate limited so that even a human reporting multiple items has to sit and wait. [...] They have a CAPTCHA on the abuse reporting form.
Yes, I agree. I reported hundreds of ".pages.dev" sites (hosted by their Cloudflare Pages service), the form restricts it to 1 unique domain per report, so I had to make hundreds of individual reports but they did take them down.
> they are "so much worse" than anyone else
I don't agree with this, in my experience they have taken action on some reports meanwhile some other companies have done nothing (DigitalOcean (Doesn't deal with any of my reports, known for being infested with bad actors, now they're the first ASN I block when I'm setting up a firewall), AWS (their customer spammed me for months, tried telling me the email didn't originate from them, but it did.), Dynadot (will not do anything without court orders, warrants) )
I mean if the security stack misses that (forgivable) but then allows this:
> When executed, it establishes a connection to an external file share, typically via WebDAV, to download an LNK or VBS file. When executed, the LNK/VBS executes a BAT or CMD file
It fucking sucks.
Completely agree. And over the years I have found it sad how many people (some who considered themselves computer experts) I had to explain what extensions are, why they are needed, how to make them show, and etc.
I see am connecting to Comcast, it says so right on my modem.
Their systems are telling them that try.cloudflare.com is not a trustworthy domain, but it is so ubiquitous, that blocking them isn't feasible.
On the contrary. The tendency of those expectations turning into assumptions is the wider issue.
But you're not the customer, you're the consumer.
Are they pitching themselves as safer for the consumer?
a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource.
Framing cloudflare as the enabler is missing the bigger picture.
I remember back in the day I needed to turn off autoplay on Windows to not get accidentally infected by malicious drives.
No one was insane enough to blame the CD-RW and flash drive manufacturers.
cloudflare isn't acting like a CD-RW or a flash drive. They're acting like a storefront that sells fraudulent flash drives that say they're 1TB when they're actually 200MB, or don't work at all when you plug it in, or worse catch fire. A storefront that refuses to take the faulty products off the shelves when customers complain, refuses to stop selling merchandise they sourced from criminals, and refuses to do even basic due diligence to make sure the products they sell are legitimate.
People who operate stores have a responsibility to make sure that merchandise they sell to consumers isn't fraudulent and harmful. Companies offering their services online also have a responsibility to make sure that those services aren't being used to push fraudulent and harmful content onto consumers and that they aren't acting as safe-havens for criminals.
Something about this cloudflare service is really attractive to these scammers in way that google drive isn't. Maybe it's because these scammers just haven't discovered how great google drive is as a malware delivery platform, but I suspect that they have.
Google drive has something of a history for hosting malware. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-drive-accounted-...
Now maybe all the attention on how google drive became the hottest place in town to spread malware caused google to get off their ass and do something about the abuse of their online service, and it's become a less hospitable place for criminals than it used to be. Or, maybe google has continued to neglect their responsibility to keep criminals off their service and it's the public who have just gotten more suspicious of the links to google drive in their inboxes making google drive campaigns less effective and its the novelty of cloudflare tunnels that makes them so effective. Maybe it's just easier to create cloudflare links that don't require accounts than it is to keep creating google drive accounts.
Where it matters most though, there really isn't much difference between the two services. Both have a responsibility to keep their services from being used to facilitate crime. Both should respect RFC 2142, but don't. Both can eventually get around to removing links to malware after you report it to them enough while doing basically nothing to stop that same malware from going right back up again at another URL/account. Both have more than enough resources and talent to be doing a much better job at internet abuse handling than they have been. They both just don't care enough to bother.
I want both to behave like dumb pipes. They don't have enough context to make any decisions like the ones you described. Ideally everything would be end to end encrypted so it'd be impossible for them to make the decision for me.
Lots of scammers don't want Cloudflare or Google to block the files they're trying to trick people into downloading either. There are people who feel the same way about spam, that no service provider should have right to block or even flag messages as spam for anyone else. Thankfully, most people disagree and want service providers to act on abuse complaints instead of acting as safe-havens for criminals.
Even dumb pipes need to be maintained when they start carrying something toxic/harmful that isn't supposed to be there. These are nothing like dumb pipes though. They're watching everything you and everyone else does with the service and logging it all. They're collecting every scrap of data they can while we interact with these services and they're happy to use that data when they think it'll put money in their pocket, but much less interested in using it to prevent the harm being done.
It isn't hard to find this stuff. These types of scammers are not usually very subtle. In this case they're linking to .LNK and .VBS, but scammers using these kinds of services are doing things like repeatedly uploading the exact same malware infected file, or not even bothering to modify their phishing sites each time they reupload them, or using the same keywords/broken english in their spam, etc.
These companies could automate checking to see what's at the other end of a generated link, or run a quick AV scan on an uploaded file, or to look for domains that are registered with misspellings of banks and online shopping companies, or to see if the hash of recently uploaded content matches something they recently had to take down because it violated the law and/or their own ToS/AUP.
I'm not even suggesting that they take something offline immediately if they find something, just flag it for review by an actual human with eyes and a brain and have enough humans available that it doesn't take long before that review happens. Make it easy for people to send reports of internet abuse. It's not hard to act like responsible members of the internet community, it's just takes work.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
> In this case they're linking to .LNK and .VBS, but scammers using these kinds of services are doing things like repeatedly uploading the exact same malware infected file
It sounds like you advocate for proxy servers to inspect traffic at the application layer. Is that right?
In the OSI reference model, the communications between systems are split into seven different abstraction layers: Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application.
In most cases you wouldn't need one. a URL shortener service can see what people are linking to. A webhosting company can see everything on their own servers. In the specific case of cloudflare and this particular product they may or may not need to. I notice that they do reserve the right to monitor and inspect any traffic on the Cloudflare network.
I can't block cloudflare, unless I'm willing to block half the internet. If I try to do additional inspection, I've got huge amounts of noise and I'm going to make the internet unusably slow.
And if anything a file proxy is even further away.
I don't think they've ever acted when I've reported obvious phishing and malware hosting to them.
Cloudflare should do better, but so should the entire industry. I get why companies selling security software report on this stuff, but this stuff is just a consequence of the internet allowing inbound connections sometimes.
The takeaway from this isn't "Cloudflare bad", but "block trycloudflare.com in your DNS server unless your devs use it for some reason". Same with Ngrok and any other dev tool like that.
It's like we received the good advice:
> don't eat things you can't identify
but somewhere along the way we got our wires crossed so now it's
> don't look at things you can't identify
But we're still acting like only an idiot would ever fail to adhere to this perfectly reasonable advice, when actually it's a recipe for having users with no idea what a real threat actually looks like.
Much better would be if you can safely click all links (just don't, you know, run it or whatever the dangerous action is) so that you can annotate what you find there as either threatening or trustworthy--the better to help out your peers.
Now we regret our naivety, but it's too late to take a systemic approach. It's all grandfathered in.
TryCloudflare, IMO, is the real problem here. It doesn’t require an account at all, so attribution becomes nearly impossible.
0: https://www.guidepointsecurity.com/blog/tunnel-vision-cloudf...
This isn't news worthy
I reported it and showed how you could trivially create a page that said "Sign in to your Cloudflare account to get access to the Cloudflare beta preview!" and capture Cloudflare login credentials.
The bug bounty was closed as they said it was "accepted as the nature of the cloudflarepreview playground".
Then they fixed it by adding a JWT token to the URL (and no bounty paid).
I've been a Cloudflare customer for a long time but it seems that there are many dark corners of their products that just don't get a lot of attention until they are abused, and I suspect this TryCloudflare thing is one of them.
I guess we sorta kinda have a little of that in the form of social-media accounts that get "trusted" based on the number of followers and their followers' followers and bots all the way down, etc. Or PageRank and SEO exploitation.
I guess this type of traffic would only get flagged if attackers were skids (ie, re-using known RATs)
Prodigy / CompuServe / Blue Light gang checking in
GEnie was another that was kind of fun. And I still can remember my CompuServe number!
In fact, Cloudflare is actually the second largest DNS provider in the world by number of domains served. [11]
They are in a position to log and analyze all of the traffic they decrypt, including all of the plaintext POST data, all of the cookies, all of the origin IPs, L7 payload sizes, and traffic timestamps for over 35 million websites.
Their extensive history of indiscriminately offering "free" services to evildoers likely ties back to their true purpose, which Matthew Prince has admitted to [12], which is to sell all of those passwords, all of that PII, all of your privacy, not only to the US government, but also to other bidders.
It is no exaggeration to say that anyone opposed to spam, phishing, malware, cybercrime, terrorism, war crimes, government surveillance dragnets, and infringements upon one's own digital privacy should have nothing but utter contempt for the soulless monsters responsible for this corporate atrocity.
If you are as passionate about the subject as I am after reading some of these citations, I'd encourage you to boycott any websites using CF that you don't need to visit, and make plenty of phone calls to California senators, representatives, and the governor demanding that the state of California revoke Cloudflare's corporate charter and right to conduct business in the state.
[1] https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2014/12/free-ssl-cert...
[2] https://forum.spamcop.net/topic/14194-cloudflare-bulletproof...
[3] https://thehackernews.com/2023/08/cybercriminals-abusing-clo...
[4] https://www.threatdown.com/blog/cloudflare-tunnel-increasing...
[5] https://any.run/cybersecurity-blog/clouflare-phishing-campai...
[6] https://venturebeat.com/security/rogue-ad-network-site-likel...
[7] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/cybercriminals-use-revers...
[8] https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...
[9] https://cyberscoop.com/cloudflare-ipo-terrorism-narcotics/
[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-firm-helps-hamas-netanyahu-...
[11] https://bgp.he.net/report/tophosts
[12] https://0xacab.org/blockedbyriseup/deCloudflare/-/raw/master...
And equally so is whoever they trust to provide the hardware to host their website on. Most of the time, it's someone else.
(edit: Your last source is laughable. Some real conspiracy theory shit)
The chance that cloudflare is getting access to all incoming traffic in plaintext is 100%.
When you say it is conspiracy theory shit (CTS) do you mean that what the text says is CTS, or do you mean that whatever inference the site that copied the text from the BBC is trying to get you to infer from their underlining is CTS?
jetstress.net - Cloudflare
maxstresser.com - Cloudflare
neostress.cc - Cloudflare
quezstresser.ru - Cloudflare
rawstresser.net - Cloudflare
stresse.net - Cloudflare
stresser.su - Cloudflare
stresser.zone - Cloudflare
stresserst.su - DDoSGuard
sunnystresser.com - Cloudflare
I could keep going but you get the point. This has been ongoing for years and they consistently ignore abuse reports.
Given that CFs bread and butter is selling DDoS mitigation this is a blatant conflict of interest.
There is no conflict when the goal is making money. They'll be glad to look the other way.
This is a good thing, and pretty refreshing compared to the kafka-esque scenarios that Google and others offer when shutting down entire businesses based on the whims of some blackbox AI detection system or fraudulent DMCA notice.
You instead want to be talking to browser and search engine providers and reporting there, as well as your government for illegal activities.
We've had better luck getting random Moldovan ISPs to shut down service than we've had in getting CloudFlare to give a damn.
Again, get a court order and they'll take action. They are legally required to. Random Moldovan ISPs don't operate at the scale CF does, no wonder they were faster. Probably also easier to bribe as well ;)
GGP is asking for more blocking, so I don't think they mind that particular reason.
Well, if at least the Big Five (CF, Akamai, AWS, GCP, Azure) could get their shit together and cooperate against the bad actors, using netblocks against hostile IP ranges (both egress and ingress) could start making sense again.
It's not much of an ask to at least keep DDoS providers out, even from a free speech absolutist position it's a stretch to say that DDoS should be protected speech.
If DDoS4U gets banned they can just rebrand as DDoS4Less and CF is (willingly?) none the wiser that it's the same people behind it.
What you are asking for is KYC to be implemented.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-daily-stormer-got-pushed...
Just because a few bad actors cause harm shouldn't mean everyone should be losing rights and giving up bits of their freedom because someone ruined it for everyone else.
Didn't matter what it is: weapons, or fireworks, or even the right to code. Sacrifice of everyone's rights and freedom to choose all in the name of reducing the odds of something happening seems odd. The very regulation of what someone can and can not do, while it might theoretically reduce risk (an argument for correlation not causation exists here) can't possibly oughtweigh the fact your restricting people free will and autonomy. The constant regulation and restriction of thing is our life only stifle innovation, act as barriers to entry, and force the creativity out of peoples lives.