I accidentally logged phone calls to military bases (lina.sh)
85 points by gavide 3 hours ago
trilogic a minute ago
R.I.P You remind me of Mitnick, this is incarnation cause you have the same style verbatim. Glad to know your breed is still active.
toast0 44 minutes ago
> It never really took off though, and even back in its early days it saw barely any use. Over the years it just deteriorated further, and today it's basically completely dead.
It's actually not completely dead... It's just (almost) completely non-public.
You can subscribe to services to get number porting information where the interface is basically e164.arpa queries to a private nameserver over a VPN. I don't know the details, the cost was high enough that it didn't make sense for my employer to pursue it.
wolrah 14 minutes ago
It's also not uncommon for telecom providers to use it for their own internal routing because enough telecom software did in fact develop support for it despite lack of public implementations.
As someone who's been in the VoIP industry for over 20 years it makes me sad to think of what could have been if both ENUM and IPv6 were more widely adopted. For many years you could reach me via email, SIP, or Jabber with the same identifier and if there were effective support for ENUM in the USA my work phone number would have been able to connect you to any of them, directly and with G.722 HD voice long before it eventually came to modern cellular networks.
tosti 17 minutes ago
> The source IPs were mostly American.
> So I had accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone numbers and timestamps for calls going to military bases.
That's quite a jump to conclusion right there.
matteason 6 minutes ago
Where else would they be calling on Diego Garcia apart from the military base?
alasdair_ 9 minutes ago
The poster knows the phone numbers that were called. It doesn’t seem difficult to check who owns the numbers.
dylan604 9 minutes ago
Not really. It's a pretty logical assumption. It sounds as if you might not be familiar with Diego Garcia?
shorsher an hour ago
The article mentions Ascension Island, a small island in the south atlantic. There's a really great spy novel that takes places there, Ascension by Oliver Harris.
joncrane 12 minutes ago
Now THIS is what hacking is all about. Very cool.
adolph an hour ago
This is a great story. Almost wish the author had dug a little further in and discovered something like Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg, but a nice writeup nontheless.
Makes me wonder how many partly implemented but ignored protocols like this exist.