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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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raverbashing·

Yes, but the natural thing would to be not to have anything HTTP on its path

(Unless of course some IT department has transparent proxies that try to be too smart)

And that's why some sanity checks are important (magic numbers on the protocol, size limits, etc)

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Another possibility is that someone in IT or corporate security bought a fancy vulnerability scanner and is blindly running it against everything on the internal network. They might even change any existing firewall rules to allow it to contact every host

Vulnerability scanners tend not to do anything with unknown custom services, running on ports they probably don't even bother to scan.

Major enterprise vulnerability scanner author here (15 years ago). Yes, we scanned the port, and yes, we ran a lot of fingerprinting rules against it until we figured out what it was (or ran out of rules), so that we'd know what vulnerabilities to test for.

This had some amusing side effects when we encountered some services we'd never seen before, like the port on HP printers that sends every byte straight to print... apparently expecting PCL or PostScript but if it didn't understand it, it just printed the ASCII. Came into the office one morning to find all printers out of paper and 500 sheets sitting in the output tray. Oops.

> the port on HP printers that sends every byte straight to print

That seems like a design flaw. :)

At a minimum, it seems like a way to DOS an HP printer...

Now that's "Resource Exhaustion".

And not just the paper. You might be able to DOS the ink as well.

If we are going there, toner

I remember my first epson dot matrix receiving data from my z80.

Print a graphic was done by sending exactly every dot to it, I mean, 1 to put a dot on the paper, 0 to blank. Encoded as a byte...

It worked, you found a vulnerability.

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