Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don’t see that as a user. Also it’s a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.
Because it’s the least-likely position to be staffed by a company. It’s the “least important” person to have… until it breaks. Often a company relies on routing-switching engineers to do DNS instead of hiring a dedicated DDI engineer (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). It saves money in the short term, but when shit hits the fan… no one knows how to fix it because DNS is really easy until it’s not. DNS is super simple at a basic level. But it goes way deeper than most people realize.
Well that sounds like my dream job, unfortunately this issue in particular is more of a Lemmy problem, not a DNS problem. See: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200 for the explanation of why you cant just transfer domains with Lemmy.
Also, if you’re genuinely interested in this field, first you should enter the world of enterprise network engineering. Get Security +, CCNA, and PCNSA. With those certs in hand (and knowledge in your brain), apply to jobs as a network support engineer. Do the work for a few years. Learn BIND. Learn Infoblox. Focus on learning DHCP and subnetting. Learn DNSSEC & IPv6. Experiment with a Pi Hole. Set up a home lab. Apply to jobs with DNS. Start living the good life. This takes about 10 years if you learn fast and are good at interviews.
I only just now saw this post, the last month i have already been going all out to learn everything that i need for my Security+ (then CySec+) i have a 30hr video course im part way thorugh, and ive set up a few VMs with various servers like OWASP Security Shepherd and Dam Vunurable Web App for some more hands on experience as well as testing on my personal production Nextcloud and Jellyfin servers and ive been having alot of fun with it all, i think im pretty solid with DHCP and subnetting already through my home networking adventures. I will look into each of those other Certs and each thing you mention to learn thank you! Ive been deep into various Linux systems since about 2008 and im hoping to leverage that as much as i can(although its left me with a lack of modern Windows experience).
Thank you so much for all the tips! I feel some good things coming as im getting into this as work.
When I was talking my cyber security / ethical hacking class, we learned how to do zone transfer. The concept never stuck and I basically “copy” from my friend. So what exactly is a DNS Zone Transfer?
Friday I was doing a zone transfer! What are the odds?
A zone transfer is like moving houses, except for an authoritative zone.
In DNS, we have what’s called an authoritative zone. That means the device hosting the “resource records” (all the data that DNS passes around) is the “ultimate” answer. I.e, it’s not cached data. It’s not a hosts file. It’s not a recursive answer. It’s the real deal.
When you want to move the authoritative zone to another server, you do a “zone transfer” that means the new server will copy all the resource records over TCP from current authoritative zone. The reason you may want to do this instead of manually hand-jamming it is that many large organizations have, sometimes, hundreds of resource records (last month I coordinated a zone transfer that was over 1000 records!).
Why would a hacker want to conduct a zone transfer? In otherwords, what is the utility or usefulness of a zone transfer for a hacker (black or white hat)?
If you initiate a zone transfer, you can now claim to be authoritative for a zone. That means you can be a ‘bad actor’ DNS server that serves fake records. In practice, this means that you can redirect people to an attack site.
Let’s say you’re Joe the Random Internet User and you want to go to lemmy.world This is what happens in a non-attack (we’re skipping caching & non-authoritative answers for brevity):
You type “lemmy.world” into your browser
Your computer initiates a stub resolution for lemmy.world. (the trailing dot here isn’t a period. It’s the “true” FQDN)
Computer looks at hosts file and doesn’t see anything
DNS packets are sent to your configured DNS server. If you don’t have one configured, DHCP already configured it for you
Your DNS server performs a recursive search for world by asking the root zone where the “world” Name Serer is
root zone resolves world as:
world. 3600 IN NS v0n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n1.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n2.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n3.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n1.nic.world.
Your DNS server reaches out to one of those Name Server’s (That’s what the NS record is for) and asks it where “lemmy” is
world Name Server responds with:
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 172.67.218.212
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 104.21.53.208
Your DNS server contacts your computer and serves it those IP addresses. (A record’s are domain name to IP Address)
Now lets say there’s a DNS spoof attack:
Before the “world” server can get back to your DNS server, the hackers server interjects with it’s own authoritative claim that lemmy is here:
lemmy.world. 300 IN A [attack site IP]
Your DNS server contacts your computer and serves it that IP address. Your computer then contacts the attack site and you get a virus.
So, how some companies get right to sell TLDs? Can I start selling TLDs nowdays? It’s just that they were there first and get all top level domains and now we have to pay for it?
Companies don’t/can’t sell TLD’s. Only IANA can decide those. When the internet first started, .org, .net, .com etc. were handed out to non-profit organizations and the costs were purely to keep the servers running. Eventually though, when IANA decided to hand out country codes like .io (Indian Ocean), .cat (Catalonia) or .tv (Tuvalu), those countries rent their “desirable” names to private organizations that sell domain registrations for lots of money. In 2013, IANA decided to enact the gTLD auctions to help raise more money. Basically, if you wanted to (and had a lot of money & DNS engineers on staff), you could register any TLD you want provided you were willing to make a large donation to IANA. If someone else wanted it, they had to go into an action war over it. That’s how we ended up with things like .party or .sport or .world cough Now-a-days, if you want a TLD, you’d have to convince IANA to give you one… But good luck with that. They won’t give you one unless you’re some major corporation that can actually handle it. They also just don’t give them out. Usually it’s only when they really feel like more TLD’s are needed. It’s a very serious responsibility and mismanagement could accidentally DDOS a DNS root zone & impact the internet.
Could users set a temporary entry in their hosts file pointing the .ml domains to public IPs in order to regain access to their account if they needed to?
Can Lemmy federate to an IP address directly or will the settings only accept an fqdn?
Will a Lemmy instance work behind a reverse proxy.
There are several problem with this including total lack of SSL without the proper cert for that other domain, also Lemmy.ml’s IP seems to be running a reverse proxy so the internal IP that we would want to connect to is not visible to the world this is common for web security, the owners must set allowed domains and ports in their config file.
Yes. Unless there’s some kind of crazy domain-level hi-jinks involved with Lemmy (I am not versed in Lemmy), pointing directly to the IP will work if you bypass it by spoofing your DNS (Hosts file, for example).
I don’t know how Lemmy federation works, sorry :(
See #2
Sorry that I couldn’t answer more of your questions.
They don’t know unless the DNS server tells them. For example, a very popular webhost Akamai uses a complex DNS + web hosting suite (DNS edgesuit to be exact) to send that type of data to the web servers. It can also allow for many many other features.
To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:
Your web browser automatically checks the A record “www” if “cakefarts.com” doesn’t have an A record. A records are the records in a DNS server that says “this domain goes here”
For the ‘record’, www is just a really common record name. There’s nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It’s up to the domain owner.
The “.com” and “.org” and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.
Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got “ml” for example but Tuvalu got “tv”. (Yes, technically “.tv” has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where “.sport” or “.dentist” come from.
Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want “greatgatsby.com” you have to talk to the “.com” owners. If you want “greatgatsby.sport” you talk to the “.sport” owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.
So anyways now you own a domain like “greatgatsby.sport”, what do you want to host? Mail at “mail.greatgatsby.sport”? A website at world wide web aka “www.greatgatsby.sport”? Up to you.
Over time, largely by convention “www” became where you put your website.
How does the TLD get reclaimed? I’m assuming whoever was previously the “owner” of the .ml tld was on board and Mali didn’t just come along and snatch it away?
So here’s the thing about TLD’s, ownership of them is determined by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). They’re basically my career’s gods. If they tell me to jump, I ask “how high”. They control the DNS root zone. Effectively, that’s the actual top-level of ALL domains. If they decide to remove a TLD or reassign it, all you can do is lodge a complaint straight to their shredder. They’re owned and operated by ICANN, a non-profit organization.
Back in 2013, Mali allowed a private Netherlands company to “manage” (rent) their TLD, .ML Recently, that company (Freenom) got sued by Meta. Even though I don’t really like Meta, as a network engineer, I don’t like Freenom even more. They turn a blind eye to bad actors on the internet, refuse to investigate hackers/scammers/DDOSers, and generally refuse to play ball. They are a huge pain in the ass. Due to the lawsuit, IANA reassigned ML to Mali since they asked for it. At the end of the day you “cant” sell a country-level TLD. Mali was renting it to Freenom under the table. This happens a lot and IANA usually just looks the other way. .io for example is the freakin’ Indian Ocean.
So yeah, Mali didn’t “snatch” it. They just asked IANA to reassign it and there isn’t shit Freenom can do about it since they never “really” owned it in the first place.
Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)
Why is it always DNS?
Because its always DNS
Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don’t see that as a user. Also it’s a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.
Because it’s the least-likely position to be staffed by a company. It’s the “least important” person to have… until it breaks. Often a company relies on routing-switching engineers to do DNS instead of hiring a dedicated DDI engineer (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). It saves money in the short term, but when shit hits the fan… no one knows how to fix it because DNS is really easy until it’s not. DNS is super simple at a basic level. But it goes way deeper than most people realize.
Well that sounds like my dream job, unfortunately this issue in particular is more of a Lemmy problem, not a DNS problem. See: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200 for the explanation of why you cant just transfer domains with Lemmy.
Also, if you’re genuinely interested in this field, first you should enter the world of enterprise network engineering. Get Security +, CCNA, and PCNSA. With those certs in hand (and knowledge in your brain), apply to jobs as a network support engineer. Do the work for a few years. Learn BIND. Learn Infoblox. Focus on learning DHCP and subnetting. Learn DNSSEC & IPv6. Experiment with a Pi Hole. Set up a home lab. Apply to jobs with DNS. Start living the good life. This takes about 10 years if you learn fast and are good at interviews.
I only just now saw this post, the last month i have already been going all out to learn everything that i need for my Security+ (then CySec+) i have a 30hr video course im part way thorugh, and ive set up a few VMs with various servers like OWASP Security Shepherd and Dam Vunurable Web App for some more hands on experience as well as testing on my personal production Nextcloud and Jellyfin servers and ive been having alot of fun with it all, i think im pretty solid with DHCP and subnetting already through my home networking adventures. I will look into each of those other Certs and each thing you mention to learn thank you! Ive been deep into various Linux systems since about 2008 and im hoping to leverage that as much as i can(although its left me with a lack of modern Windows experience).
Thank you so much for all the tips! I feel some good things coming as im getting into this as work.
I left my job as a network engineer to do DDI and it’s been a blast. A lot more to DNS than I could have imagined.
Also, a cat explains DNS.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4ZtFk2dtqv0?si=uSI3Rzzh49cN_Yl5
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Ah, thanks for the info! I have no idea how Lemmy stuff works. I only became aware of Lemmy last month.
When I was talking my cyber security / ethical hacking class, we learned how to do zone transfer. The concept never stuck and I basically “copy” from my friend. So what exactly is a DNS Zone Transfer?
Friday I was doing a zone transfer! What are the odds?
A zone transfer is like moving houses, except for an authoritative zone.
In DNS, we have what’s called an authoritative zone. That means the device hosting the “resource records” (all the data that DNS passes around) is the “ultimate” answer. I.e, it’s not cached data. It’s not a hosts file. It’s not a recursive answer. It’s the real deal.
When you want to move the authoritative zone to another server, you do a “zone transfer” that means the new server will copy all the resource records over TCP from current authoritative zone. The reason you may want to do this instead of manually hand-jamming it is that many large organizations have, sometimes, hundreds of resource records (last month I coordinated a zone transfer that was over 1000 records!).
Why would a hacker want to conduct a zone transfer? In otherwords, what is the utility or usefulness of a zone transfer for a hacker (black or white hat)?
If you initiate a zone transfer, you can now claim to be authoritative for a zone. That means you can be a ‘bad actor’ DNS server that serves fake records. In practice, this means that you can redirect people to an attack site.
Let’s say you’re Joe the Random Internet User and you want to go to lemmy.world This is what happens in a non-attack (we’re skipping caching & non-authoritative answers for brevity):
world. 3600 IN NS v0n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n1.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n2.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n3.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n1.nic.world.
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 172.67.218.212
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 104.21.53.208
Now lets say there’s a DNS spoof attack:
lemmy.world. 300 IN A [attack site IP]
So, how some companies get right to sell TLDs? Can I start selling TLDs nowdays? It’s just that they were there first and get all top level domains and now we have to pay for it?
Thanks in advance.
They paid a huge amount of money to get a TLD
Companies don’t/can’t sell TLD’s. Only IANA can decide those. When the internet first started, .org, .net, .com etc. were handed out to non-profit organizations and the costs were purely to keep the servers running. Eventually though, when IANA decided to hand out country codes like .io (Indian Ocean), .cat (Catalonia) or .tv (Tuvalu), those countries rent their “desirable” names to private organizations that sell domain registrations for lots of money. In 2013, IANA decided to enact the gTLD auctions to help raise more money. Basically, if you wanted to (and had a lot of money & DNS engineers on staff), you could register any TLD you want provided you were willing to make a large donation to IANA. If someone else wanted it, they had to go into an action war over it. That’s how we ended up with things like .party or .sport or .world cough Now-a-days, if you want a TLD, you’d have to convince IANA to give you one… But good luck with that. They won’t give you one unless you’re some major corporation that can actually handle it. They also just don’t give them out. Usually it’s only when they really feel like more TLD’s are needed. It’s a very serious responsibility and mismanagement could accidentally DDOS a DNS root zone & impact the internet.
Could users set a temporary entry in their hosts file pointing the .ml domains to public IPs in order to regain access to their account if they needed to?
Can Lemmy federate to an IP address directly or will the settings only accept an fqdn?
Will a Lemmy instance work behind a reverse proxy.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.
There are several problem with this including total lack of SSL without the proper cert for that other domain, also Lemmy.ml’s IP seems to be running a reverse proxy so the internal IP that we would want to connect to is not visible to the world this is common for web security, the owners must set allowed domains and ports in their config file.
If none of that was a problem Lemmy itself does not do well with changing domains, as highlighted here: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200
Sorry that I couldn’t answer more of your questions.
Why is it always dns
deleted by creator
They don’t know unless the DNS server tells them. For example, a very popular webhost Akamai uses a complex DNS + web hosting suite (DNS edgesuit to be exact) to send that type of data to the web servers. It can also allow for many many other features.
Woot we’re saved.
So why do we need the .com or .org or whatever at all? And the www. as well?
I remember when I had to type the whole http://www.cakefarts.com and now just cakefarts.com works. What changed? And what’s next?
To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:
For the ‘record’, www is just a really common record name. There’s nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It’s up to the domain owner.
The “.com” and “.org” and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.
Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got “ml” for example but Tuvalu got “tv”. (Yes, technically “.tv” has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where “.sport” or “.dentist” come from.
Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want “greatgatsby.com” you have to talk to the “.com” owners. If you want “greatgatsby.sport” you talk to the “.sport” owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.
So anyways now you own a domain like “greatgatsby.sport”, what do you want to host? Mail at “mail.greatgatsby.sport”? A website at world wide web aka “www.greatgatsby.sport”? Up to you.
Over time, largely by convention “www” became where you put your website.
From there you have two options, you can setup a redirect from “http://greatgatsby.sport” to “http://www.greatgatsby.sport” or you can do a little hosting “trick” and just make “http://greatgatsby.sport” return your website.
Btw, .com is owned by the US Department of COMmerce. .org is owned by a non-profit organization called “Public Internet Registry”
Why is it always DNS?
How does the TLD get reclaimed? I’m assuming whoever was previously the “owner” of the .ml tld was on board and Mali didn’t just come along and snatch it away?
So here’s the thing about TLD’s, ownership of them is determined by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). They’re basically my career’s gods. If they tell me to jump, I ask “how high”. They control the DNS root zone. Effectively, that’s the actual top-level of ALL domains. If they decide to remove a TLD or reassign it, all you can do is lodge a complaint straight to their shredder. They’re owned and operated by ICANN, a non-profit organization.
Back in 2013, Mali allowed a private Netherlands company to “manage” (rent) their TLD, .ML Recently, that company (Freenom) got sued by Meta. Even though I don’t really like Meta, as a network engineer, I don’t like Freenom even more. They turn a blind eye to bad actors on the internet, refuse to investigate hackers/scammers/DDOSers, and generally refuse to play ball. They are a huge pain in the ass. Due to the lawsuit, IANA reassigned ML to Mali since they asked for it. At the end of the day you “cant” sell a country-level TLD. Mali was renting it to Freenom under the table. This happens a lot and IANA usually just looks the other way. .io for example is the freakin’ Indian Ocean.
So yeah, Mali didn’t “snatch” it. They just asked IANA to reassign it and there isn’t shit Freenom can do about it since they never “really” owned it in the first place.