It's not that it's on the 172.16.0.0/12 range. That's totally normal and used for all kinds of stuff.
It's that it's in 172.16.42.0/24 which is the default dhcp settings for a wifi pineapple. It's the /24 mask given on the .42 that's a little suspicious because that's not a common range for anything else.
Being assigned one of those specific 253 hosts with that subnet mask would definitely make me think twice.
It's the /24 mask given on the .42 that's a little suspicious because that's not a common range for anything else.
Well now I know. I operate a ton of /24 subnets in the 172.16.0.0/12 scope. Technically I could fit them in the 192.168.0.0/16 scope, but I have lots of students connecting SoHo wifi-routers to the subnets, and this way it's pretty easy to tell, if someone put the WAN cable in a LAN port when people are getting 192.168.1.0/24 DHCP offers.
It should be fine as long you don't click through any SSL errors. And something like a bank should have HSTS enabled, meaning your browser will refuse to load the site if there's an SSL error.
sets subnet to 10.0.0.0/16 so I don’t have to type a yee yee ass class B/C address everytime I wanna do something with an address
Personally I find 172.16.0.0/12 addresses are easier for me to quickly type accurately than any other private range. 192.168.0.0/16 is just too many similar-but-different digits, and 10.0.0.0/8 is too many similar/the same digits before I get to the digits I actually care about, so both are more error prone for me
So I guess I must be a leet haxor because of all the businesses I configured for the 172.x space because 192.168.x space was too small and 10.x space was way the hell too big.
I know what subnetting is for. That’s why I know which RFC range to use. I’m talking based on the number of devices and needed groupings, 172 is a good sweet spot where 198.x would be a bit tight and 10.x is complete overkill.
For bigger networks, I always went with 10.0.0.0/8 for endpoints, 172.16.0.0/12 for servers and other back-end services, leaving 192.168.0.0/16 for smaller networks like OOB IPMI (eg HP iLO, Dell iDrac) services, cluster heartbeat connections, and certain DMZ segments.
My current work acquired a company with a very poorly provisioned IT department. Their networks all happen to be in the low 192.168.0.0/16 so users VPNing in often end up with wonky IP conflicts. I've heard warnings about similar when selecting subnet ranges, so I just stick with low 192.168.0.0/16 ranges for home networks from which I might potentially VPN into a network I don't control, and I use 172.16.0.0/12 or 10.0.0.0/8 at work as needed and as aligns with our wider topology.
I will also add that I encountered some fun challenges at a small bank I worked at where they clearly under-planned their network and carried a bunch of wonky configs as vestigial networking adaptations as they grew. They did do a cool thing where they made each branch its own /24 subnet so you could tell at a glance exactly what branch someone was connecting from, plus branches could theoretically limp along with an ISP outage, but they didn't the extra steps of setting up edge servers so the end result was a full branch outage during an ISP outage
That’s doable too. A lot of people don’t realize you can route all of those together. It’s even more fun as technically you can route private addresses across public links if you own both ends of the link. Used to see that done at a large ISP to route their internal network and it’d pop new networking admins minds.
ETA: I would use 192.x IPs for unrouted subnets like heartbeats or iSCSI.
Yes, back when I was playing around with my WiFi pineapple there were a wide variety of tricks to break SSL authentication without it being obvious to users. Easiest was to terminate the SSL connection on the pineapple and re-encrypt it with a new SSL cert from there to the users browser, so to the user it looked like everything was secure but in reality their traffic was only encrypted from them to the pineapple, then decrypted, sniffed and re-encrypted to pass along to the target websites with normal SSL.
Man in the middle attacks really do give the attacker tons of options
That kind of ssl interception would normally be quite visible without your client device having the pineapples cert in your devices trust store, or am I wrong?
Not often. For web browsing - and the majority of apps - your session is encrypted and certified. Breaking SSL is possible but you'll know about it due to the lack of certs.
While I've never seen a router default to the 172.16... range, to me it just means that someoe bothered to modify the settings. No wonder the network is faster.
A lot of the comments here are saying that a pineapple can configure their subnet to use 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x. Is there any other way to determine if an access point is compromised?
Isn’t that how the setup works for any relatively large company? I admittedly haven’t worked in many, but that’s usually the case for corporate computers at least.
I think the idea there is that the whole Class B private range starts at 172.16.0.x so it's unlikely, that any hotel you're at would be using 172.16.42.x because it's so far irom the start of that range unless it's a chain that needs to keep its ranges separate between sites for VPN or documentation reasons.
Basically, seeing 172.16.42.x doesn't inherently mean something's wrong, and I'm sure people using the pineapple for nefarious reasons would be smart enough to change its default LAN, but if you see it, maybe be more cautious.
Also if you bring one onto a real network to pwn it you're probably deliberately not replacing it's DHCP server so you don't break static IP assignments (but you might fake the routes so traffic goes through you anyway with ARP spoofing, etc)