Selfhosted @lemmy.world haui @lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 mo. ago

My stupidity saved me from being hacked today!

I know, I know, clickbaity title but in a way it did. It also brought in the situation in the first place but I'm just going to deliberately ignore that. Quick recap:

I came home at 3pm from the city, my internet at home didnt work.
checked multiple devices, phones worked out of wifi, I figured I need to restart the router
I login to the router and it responds totally normal but my local network doesnt. (Its always dns, I know)
I check the router log and see 100s of login attempts over the past couple of days.
I panic and pull the plug, try to get into my server by installing an old monitor, works, many errors about dns
Wife googles with her phone, seems I had https login from outside on and someone found the correct port, its disabled now
Obviously, local network still down, I replug everything and ssh into the server which runs pihole as dns
pihole wont start dns, whatever I do
I use history and find I "chmod 700"ed the dns mask directory instead of putting it in a docker volume...
I check the pihole.log, nothing
I check the FTL log, there is the issue
I return it to 777, everything is hunky dory again.

Now I feel very stupid but I found a very dangerous mistake by having my lan fail due to a less dangerous mistake so I'll take this as a win.

Thanks for reading and have a good day! I hope this helps someone at some day.

53 comments

Did you expose your router login page to the open internet? How'd they get access? Why are you chmoding anything to be 777?
- There was an option that I had enabled years before and forgotten so yes, I didnt know but it was, on some obscure port.
  
  And yes, pihole in docker makes its files be 777 which is pretty disgusting, I know. Thats why I tried to make it 700 and broke my whole network.
  
  Doubt. You probably need to set the file owners in your volume to the same user running in the container.
  
  I think you are still learning... What you say doesn't make sense, so I think you may have misunderstood what happened.
Wipe and start fresh
- Are you joking? Why would I start fresh?
  
  Because you don't have a way to know what's been compromised. Take your data only and make sure to verify nothings been tampered with.
  
  Trust me it will be better in the long run.
  
  If you have everything on docker compose migrating to another host is pretty easy. I could probably migrate my 11 stacks of 36 containers in 2 to 3 hrs
  
  Why would I start fresh?
  
  If they had access to a machine, the first thing you do is install some kind of root kit so you can get access again later. This could be as small as modifying an existing binary to do things it isn't supposed to do.
  
  If they didn't access any machine, your fine.
777? Bruh just set the owner?
- The owner was root and still is. I changed from 777 to 700 which broke everything. Sorry if that wasnt clear. I will switch to a docker volume to avoid having this crap in my hone folder in the future.
I'm referring you to my quick "self-hosting guide": https://lemmy.world/comment/7126969
- Thast awesome! Thanks! Bookmarked!
- Saved~~
One of my fears of starting up my homelab.
- All you have to do to avoid this is just not open any ports except one for something like wireguard, and only access your network using it externally, and you will never have this problem.
  
  Exactly. It wasnt on purpose either. I thought there was an additional layer of security, gullible as I was 5 yrs ago. They made it seem like there was.
  
  Gotta have a firewall that closely resembles swiss cheese.
- One of my home servers was popped once, they stuck a new MOTD on there to let me know how foolish I was and I haven't made that mistake since. So... yay greyhat?
I’ve adopted a policy of always ebetering my password wrong the first time.

It started by accident.
- Trying to work out why this is a good idea. Please could you explain why?
  
  They can’t swipe your password if it’s wrong
  
  They could of course enter it on the target website and see it’s wrong though, so this only works against the crappiest phishing attempts
- This is very smart 😃 never thought about that
That's why I love Tailscale, nothing is open to the internet, all my shit is local lan inside Tailscale. Even better I don't have to bother with certificates and reverse proxy.
- Reverse proxy isnt that hard tbh. Btw I have a vpn and my lan isnt open to the web. The router vendor made it look like there was an additional layer of security.
- Not sure how reverse proxy is avoided this way --- do you enter port numbers for your services when you access them, or have one service per machine?
  
  I have a few publicly accessible services, and a bunch of private services, but everything is reverse proxy'd --- I find it very convenient, as for example I can go to https://wap.mydomain.net for my access point admin page, or photos.mydomain.net for my Immich instance. I have a reverse proxy on my VPS for public services, and another one on my lan for private services; WireGuard between VPS, LAN, and my personal devices. Possibly have huge security holes of course...
  
  Yep correct http://hostname:port por each application, all running in the same host on docker. The only thing it would be that any device that would want to connect to an app needs the Tailscale client. And would take over the VPN slot. That's why they offer exit nodes with mullvad and also DNS privacy resolvers like NextDNS.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

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