The Joys of Skiddy Baiting

        Skiddy Baiting (script kiddy baiting) is the art of luring people with malevolent intentions into doing malevolence to themselves. Think of it as being sort of like a honey pot, but geared more towards PEV (personal entertainment value) than research. Sometimes folks are feeling mean spirited, maybe because they were not given enough love as a child, or perhaps they received the wrong type of love. I was feeling this way a few weeks back, so I made the following post on the front page of my site:

Two quick updates. First, I've put up a forum at http://irongeek.com/forum/index.php so I can show how to crack md5 hashes and why it's a bad idea to use the same password everyplace. Please feel free to sign up, but keep in mind I may use you as a test example for password cracking. :) Also, for those interested in DoSing my site or trying exploits on it, please feel free to attack the host name hackme.irongeek.com . Enjoy.

        Did I really set up a test box for people to DoS (Denial of Service attack)? Nope, what I had done is map the DNS entry for hackme.irongeek.com to point to 127.0.0.1 (Hiryu from BinRev pointed out it would be better if I used something less obvious, so I switched it to 127.13.43.22 later). I must admit I got the idea from having read a story about two folks talking in IRC with one asking the other what his IP was so he could kick him from the channel. The would-be victim told the attacker his IP was 127.0.0.1 with predictable results. For those that don't know, 127.*.*.* is the local IP loopback ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback ) on most systems and is used when the machine wants to talk to itself (the local X server for example) or for testing IP applications before making them available on an out facing network interface. If you have a web server running on your local computer, try surfing to http://127.0.0.1 or if you are running MS Window with file sharing services turned on try file:///\\127.0.0.1  and you should see what I mean. Long story short, when someone tried to DoS or compromise hackme.irongeek.com they would be DoSing or compromising themselves! This lead to all sorts of hilarity in my forums:

http://www.irongeek.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3 

        I have to believe the main guy in question was just playing along and was in on the joke, but here are some of the choice quotes:

        "I'm hitting this box with everything I've got! It seems to be locked down pretty tight. But I think I've found a way in now, he's running Linux, in fact Ubuntu just as I am so that give's me an edge. Wonder if I'll just do an "rm -rf /" right away or something more sophisticated like slowly corrupting the files on the drive"

And

        "Thanks! I've set a cronjob to start overwriting the files with /dev/urandom exactly 12.00 tomorrow. Muhhahahhaha."

And of course the inevitable:

        "Hmm. Irongeek I thought you said I could hack your box????! Mere seconds before the cronjob was to start I suddenly couldn't log in to my own box anymore?!? Did you hack me in return!! That's pretty low! All my files are gone too!!! Please if you have them restore them. I've got tons of memories in there! I'm sorry I mocked you, I'll doing anything you want if you can restor my computer. I freely admit your a much greater hacker than me... just restore the files ok, lets call it quits! I don't want to have to bring the law into this........... So how will it be"


        I sort of feel bad about it now, sort of. I could set this up because I control the DNS entries for the Irongeek.com domain, but you could also pull it off by using a dynamic DNS provider like http://www.dyndns.com/ if you don't have your own domain. All it is is a simple "A Record" for mapping a host name to an IP. If you are feeling really mean spirited you could set up a DNS entry to map to a host in the IP range of the FBI, NSA or CIA's network for skiddies, to attack but that might be a bit over the top.

        Another interesting idea for messing with skiddies is to add redirects to shock sites like Goat.cx, Lemonparty or Tubgirl to your robots.txt file (thanks for the idea Tokachu). For those that don't know what the robots.txt file is check out the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt . Robots.txt is a text file that can be put at the root of a web server that webmasters will use to specify parts of their site they don't want indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo when they come by to spider the site (assuming the spider honors the robots.txt file). Since robots.txt list parts of a site that the webmaster does not want indexed, attackers know that there may be some interesting information in these locations and so will deliberately request robots.txt to look for hidden goodies. For an example of a robots.txt file see http://www.google.com/robots.txt . For a great list of shock sites visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragoonmac/List_of_Shock_Sites

        If you have any other ideas for messing with Skiddies please email them to me. I'd love to add more ideas to this short article and will of course give you credit for the addition. I hope that you have enjoyed this quick and informal article. Happy Skiddy baiting!