Hacker News Reader

Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

> Major US ISPs (Comcast, AT&T) should detect clearly suspicious activity coming from customer IPs and warn them to scan their computers, check their TV apps, and find whatever is turning their internet into a proxy. It's very bad for the customers too (slows things down, gets their IP banned, etc)

Does having TLS everywhere make this much harder?

View on HN

Not sure how it would? Because the bad actors are remotely instructing infected computers/devices to make HTTP/TLS requests for them, so they appear totally normal to the other side.

In a hypothetical world where using TLS was abnormal, you could monitor the content of whatever the bots are doing for suspicious activity. And if they chose to use TLS anyway, the mere presence of of TLS could be considered suspicious.

Back in the real world, you can also passively fingerprint TLS handshakes to characterise the client device. Most of these proxy networks masquerade as "normal" clients, but if the type and variety of device fingerprints for an IP suddenly changes, that's a signal too.

It's not a crime to buy a new device and log it in to your WiFi.

Of course not, but if someone buys 1000 new devices and rotates devices with each request, it might be worth sending them an email like "hey did you mean to be doing that?"

Until DoH and ECH are commonplace, DNS lookups and SNI probably leak enough for statistical analysis.

DNS and SNI are usually not encrypted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com