Apparently they didn't just do that, they also had them make requests way more frequently than they needed to (I guess particularly surprising given that they'd already have to be fairly negligent to have the server hard-coded):
> We learned that these packets appeared to be legitimate, well-formed Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) version 1 queries, albeit at an inexplicably high rate from each client host. For instance, during one trace, many clients produced about one query per second. This would be highly unusual for a properly constructed SNTP client, since an application which uses SNTP is merely interested in setting its own clock relatively accurately so that its host has some reasonable notion of the current time. One query per second is ridiculous, and is far from best practice for NTP client behavior.
On another note, back when I ran a web hosting business we hosted a few NTP servers in the pool. It’s such a simple thing to give back, and worth anyone who can make a stable contribution doing so.
If you do run an NTP server, please make sure it's not vulnerable to DDoS amplification (monlist, readvar, etc need to be disabled) and apply some rate limiting to make it less useful for reflection attacks. And be proactive about monitoring its traffic volume.
If you see high packet rate from a specific IP address or prefix, it's very likely not them abusing your service, but rather you attacking them by responding to spoofed requests.
Note that in the past I've had companies writing embedded linux based firmware using ntppool for time sync request their own vendor zones, however a lot of those requests were ignored so it's unclear if that's still expected. In the end they ended up just using the default ntppool domains since they never got their own vendor zones.
CNAME'ing pool-ntp.tesla.com to something they do not control is already quite risky as it would allow someone to e.g. request pool-ntp.tesla.com certificate though it might take quite a few tries.
I thought about trying this, but MPIC makes it very very very difficult (the round-robin has some geolocation magic baked in regarding what server it connects you to).
This is why IP certificates are limited to a max lifetime of 6 days.
> IP address certificates allow server operators to authenticate TLS connections to IP addresses rather than domain names. Let’s Encrypt supports both IPv4 and IPv6. IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important.
I'd try to contact Assetnote. Most (sadly not all) managed vuln scan companies are pretty sensitive to scanning stuff that doesn't belong to their client and could expose them to liabilities because they don't have permission.
Oh, and be sure to include "you're scanning a pool address so you're probably scanning a lot of other sites that don't belong to your customer". They should know it's potentially not one little web site.
Do a Tesla move and say that's a new service and they need to pay 10000 a month to keep using the service otherwise you reserve the right to mess up with the responses. :P of course, just a joke, but that's what they do
Thankfully it doesn't seem to be much traffic, but still... weird. You'd hope at somepoint the weird responses would get looked at in some log, but I won't hold my breath for that haha.
Tangential, but I love the design of your blog. That's so freakishly accurate to old GNOME 2 Ubuntu, amazing work.
So many of the news on HN, such as present one, can be actual stories/scenes from a cyberpunk game/movie these days, that we can safely assume this (otherwise imaginary) future has already arrived.
As a bug bounty researcher, my systems would do the same thing if they ended up georouted to this IP. *.tesla.com is marked as in scope on https://bugcrowd.com/engagements/tesla, and my agents will probe anything under there as it is presumed to have explicit authorization.
Not sure if there is a great solution, but I'm inclined to say that attack traffic like this is the new normal. In fact, the attack volume they got is quite small compared to the volume I have seen on other tech company subdomains - the new normal is probably much worse.
How do you suggest I determine the information is bad, if the domain is hosted on tesla.com, and Tesla says I am authorized to test it? Should I inspect all 1,368 subdomains on tesla.com by hand, and then do the same for 400+ bug bounty programs?
Maybe i'm old fashioned, but personally I think the onus should be on the person sending out unauthorized malicious requests to figure out how to not do that.
Any responsible bug bounty researcher reviewing the DNS zone by hand would spot the CNAME and remove it from the target list. You don't get to wash your hands of that because your chatbot did it.
You're now confident that the other 399+ domains you mentioned are not under any sort of duress because they're controlled by people who are away of what's happening?
I feel confident that no system exposed to the internet should have a problem with 50,000 requests per month! If they do, they probably shouldn't run a public NTP server, or have a public IP address at all.
Okay, so you're just confident in exactly how many requests everyone else in the world will be making if you try to pentest resources unbeknownst to their owners.
Are you confident you are not viewing too many pages on HN? What if many other people are also trying to read this thread?
I think this line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. The internet is not an inherently safe network regardless of what we wish for; we can't wish away the bad activity, and it's only going to increase. The activity that helps prevent the bad activity from working is a net positive.
> Are you confident you are not viewing too many pages on HN? What if many other people are also trying to read this thread?
I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare viewing a couple of pages once a day with running scripting tools against over 400 websites.
> I think this line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. The internet is not an inherently safe network regardless of what we wish for; we can't wish away the bad activity, and it's only going to increase. The activity that helps prevent the bad activity from working is a net positive.
Oh good, no one has ever claimed "it's for your own good" when doing something selfish without consent.
I just checked my own webserver logs (I also run a sever in the ntp pool) and I too see some hits in my webserver logs.
They look to all be log4j vuln scanning activity (CVE-2021-44228), and the volume isn't that high (a few a day, and not every day). They just have some overzealous vuln scanning. And yes, they shouldn't have the NTP pool under their DNS name.
I've had all sorts of strange things happen because of my ntp pool membership, this one is pretty far on the benign end of things.
I understand that Tesla is treating your NTP server, a volunteer server and part of the greater volunteer pool of NTP servers, as their own infrastructure.
However, I can't tell from the article if the scans originate with:
A.) IT staff at Tesla that are scanning exposed services on what they perceive, or claim wrongly, as their own network for vulnerabilities.
B.) Somehow a rogue operator (read botnet)
C.) A rogue operator who is using the cars themselves to run exploit scans?
I've been consistently attacked by ShadowServer who have the following sponsors,
Akamai,
APNIC Foundation,
Arctic Security,
AusCERT,
Avast,
Backblaze,
Canadian Center for Cyber Security,
CERT.AT,
CERT.br,
CERT.LV,
CIRA,
CIRCL,
Craig Newmark Philanthropies,
CSIRT.LI,
CSIS Security Group,
DFN‑CSIRT,
Digital Trust Center,
EURid,
HelseCERT,
ICANN,
Identity Digital,
KPN,
Mastercard,
NASK (CERT.pl),
NCSC Ireland,
NICS,
Nihon Cyber Defence,
Nucleus Security,
Orange Polska,
Precursor Security,
Protect.ngo,
Public Interest Registry (PIR),
Red Hat,
SURFcert,
SWITCH,
Team Cymru,
Trend Micro,
Trivest AG,
Tucows,
Verisign,
VulnCheck,
I don't care what they say they're doing, I hate how corporations can act with impunity with these types of things while everyone else would get a felony for it.
Calling vuln scanning from a non-profit a felony is a bit of a stretch. Many for-profit companies do similar vuln scanning and then threaten companies with security "scorecards". That is borderline extortion.
If the non-profit was walking down the road and rattling everybody’s door lock to see which are unlocked, and having a look around the windows to see if any are open, would that be a crime?
Because that is exactly what all of these vulnerability scanning companies are doing, and all of us sort of just… let them.
If the neighborhood was constantly being canvased by criminals checking doorknobs, so your concerned neighbor went over to your house to check your doorknob, and then let you know if you accidentally left it open, would you also accuse your neighbor of being a criminal trying to break in?
This is why the checking doors / neighborhood analogy isn't a good one.
Having one person with poor computer security negatively impacts everyone. Hacked sites turn into phishing landing pages, exploit kit hosting, stolen data dumps, and launching off points for attacks on everyone else. The vuln scanning ShadowServer is doing is meant to be a public good, which is why they share the info with ISPs and governments.
Security is too intertwined to stand by and say other people's vulnerabilities aren't your problem.
It is a good analogy because thieves stealing from one house successfully gives them resources and incentivizes them stealing from the same area again.
And even if you remove the analogy, ShadowServer means good, but good intentions doesn’t necessarily make their action moral or legal.
Yes, compromised servers can be used by hackers as means to commit crimes. But when these groups scan the entire internet, they do cause harm as well, as shown in the original linked article. Much less harm than a black hat, but they still waste time and resources from innocent third parties.
It’s fair to ask if the harm they cause is worth the good they do.
I would assume the fastest way to actually make this stop would be to setup a bunch of honeypot exploits, trigger their detection and someone will figure out what they did wrong.
Other than not, with these huge companies you have 0 recourse.
Meta not only hasn't noticed, but is currently sending about 11 requests per second to my site. I've also seemingly trapped one of those TV proxy scraper nets as I'm getting absolutely hammered by requests from all over the place now. I get maybe 10 legit visitors per day, and I'm currently blocking 406,787 IPs from things that have fallen into my honeypot.
I've tweaked my site to return empty status responses a configurable amount of time but the traffic has been so intense that Traefik is now struggling, so I'm going to have to figure out something else. I was returning over-capacity errors and I think that was a mistake, I've swapped to 400 range status codes now. I don't want to use Cloudflare so I'm not sure what to do after this.
The people at these companies are either incompetent or malicious.
Haha I did debate going much worse with the junk images but wanted to err on the side of caution in case I subject possible clients to something like goatse.
I wonder if source IP can be ping triangulated, then total ping count displayed as "Tesla MAU: +/-x% today", "Suspected ownership changes this month: xxx cars" by apparent home location changes, then residential and Tesla-unrelated locations excluded server side, and plotted on the map, then finally the whole system exposed to the public Internet and shared to SpaceX fans.
"Hey Texas Model S #345 just left KXYZ, moving at >100mph towards the pad. Everyone get cameras out!"
Unlikely, but the lazy wonks could enable stratum 1 time services with the cars GPS/cellular receiver and RTC. Having done that for equipment in the past, we all know it is literary only $8.43/unit in parts. Also, setting ntp time as the tertiary fall back has been around for over a decade. =3
Often, the folks you want to ban are not the hosts running the scans.
One's best bet is to play possum, and use your clients last login IPs falling in your service area geo-IP ranges for a firewall white-list. Then redirect the other traffic for a black hole route.
If the nuisance hosts assume they have driven the host offline, they will eventually give up and move on. =3
It’s just laziness on Tesla’s part because working your bare bones crew to failure isn’t the exception but the SOP. Same why you can’t reach anyone about Supercharger issues, this is by design to run as lean as possible for profits.
I see this in cyber clients that are perpetually short staffed and simply accept the degraded system because the consequences are minimal. If nothing important breaks, nothing changes.
People are trying to compromise Tesla and because this guy provides NTP services, and Tesla set their NTP up wrong, it appears to other people like his machine is part of Tesla.
Got it. The way it was phrased it made it sound like Assetnote was the party actually sending the exploits (which made me assume it was intentional testing going to the wrong target), not that they were coming in from unknown senders in the outside world.
50,000 requests in the span of ... 21 days? It might be interesting if it were 50 million in those 21 days (even then, 27 RPS is ... nothing). Drop a report to AWS T&S, block, drop, reject, and move on. This is like less than background noise at this point.
Edit: tamping down a bit of my prickliness because it looks like this individual is a relative newcomer to running internet-facing services. This is actually a pretty good intro to that: the place as a whole is a cesspool and any conceivable “attack”, scan, probe, pentest is, has, or will be happening at all times. Some you can mitigate yourself, others you’ll need to bring in a specialist service (see DDoS sinks and mitigation services, for example) or contact someone’s abuse address, others you just have to ignore because it’s just not directed at you personally, or just not worth more than three seconds’ thought beyond a firewall rule. This is the latter. Maybe interesting if this is the first time you’re seeing something like this, but for more grizzled operators like myself, it doesn’t even register as notable anymore.
In case of the very likely title only reader posting:
> Speculation: Assetnote pulled in everything it could find under tesla.com, including pool-ntp.tesla.com, which CNAMEs to pool.ntp.org, which can resolve to my machine — 67.215.249.229. The asset inventory saves this as a Tesla asset, and starts throwing exploits at me, a stranger.
> Not a vuln in Tesla, and I'm not asking for anything, but I just wanted to let you know that you may unintentionally be being a nuisance.
This happens EVERY day to EVERY web server out there. I have a personal site that gets thousands of requests per day from bots.
Running a public server (like NTP) means you will get tons of strange requests. Moreso if you run a web server on the same IP because bots will scrape certificate transparency logs. The entire IPv4 space is scanned continuously.
This may sound harsh, but you cannot stop it. It is whack-a-mole. Filter it and move on, go outside and touch grass, seriously. This is not worth being upset over.
I treat these as an opportunity to tune my filters and firewall rules.
You don’t think there’s a difference between “hackers try to attack everything“ and “Tesla decided that I personally need to be tested as one of their systems due to a lazy misconfiguration“ are different?
Are you asking if I think Elon had this person's website on an 80" screen in a conference room whilst they collude how to send traffic to their site?
No, I do not.
I get thousands of these "security scanner" requests on a low-traffic site weekly, if not daily. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't try to kick in my door. Are you prepared to waste valuable time in your life to separate the white hat from the black hat requests?
I would have added the IP addresses to my firewall's IP blacklist and forgotten about it the next day. It's really all you can do.
I'm aware how much crap there is on the Internet, I just think the specific nature of this (legitimate commercial vuln scanner thinks I'm Tesla) is funny
It does bring attention to: how many other organizations are doing this?
Tesla is a large enterprise.
They almost certainly subscribe to some overpriced SaaS garbage which is manned by offshore drones who by definition do not care because they're not paid enough to care.
Unfortunately this isn't the 80s anymore where you can ring up a system administrator at a university and get a human on the other end.
Please read the article, it's not the volume of the NTP requests, they're actively sending exploit/attempt to compromise payloads. They're probing things in a way that you would ordinarily only do to your own internal infrastructure.
"They tried all kinds of exploits against me: path traversal, webshell uploads, probing software internals, probing WordPress and other CMS management endpoints, SSRF, Log4Shell, and a lot more."
I don't disagree with you, I have tons of things that have public interfaces (as mundane as a fully patched wordpress where the wp-admin login is accessible to external blog writers), we get tens of thousands of random shit anything per day. But the problem here is that Tesla is treating NTP pool operators like they are their internal infrastructure. Also because the attribution of the 'attacks' is fairly well known.
I don't go complaining on the internet about the absolute shitflood of compromised routers on broadband ISPs in Indonesia probing my stuff 24x7x365 because I know it would be futile. But if I found one specific american company that was repeatedly probing my stuff all the time? Maybe I'd escalate it.
It's HTTP requests, not NTP requests, and the volume isn't the problem, it's that Assetnote is sending live exploit payloads /at all/ to a stranger on Tesla's behalf
https://www.google.com/search?&q=university+ntp+server+netge...
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/
> We learned that these packets appeared to be legitimate, well-formed Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) version 1 queries, albeit at an inexplicably high rate from each client host. For instance, during one trace, many clients produced about one query per second. This would be highly unusual for a properly constructed SNTP client, since an application which uses SNTP is merely interested in setting its own clock relatively accurately so that its host has some reasonable notion of the current time. One query per second is ridiculous, and is far from best practice for NTP client behavior.
I love articles like that.
The way a vendor embedding NTP is _meant_ to do so is documented here: https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html
On another note, back when I ran a web hosting business we hosted a few NTP servers in the pool. It’s such a simple thing to give back, and worth anyone who can make a stable contribution doing so.
When was this page last updated? I would expect that number to be in the hundreds of millions these days, perhaps even billions.
If you see high packet rate from a specific IP address or prefix, it's very likely not them abusing your service, but rather you attacking them by responding to spoofed requests.
Note that in the past I've had companies writing embedded linux based firmware using ntppool for time sync request their own vendor zones, however a lot of those requests were ignored so it's unclear if that's still expected. In the end they ended up just using the default ntppool domains since they never got their own vendor zones.
ref: https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html
Maybe running a web server on the same IP as an NTP server is a bad idea.
Hell, they issue certificates to IP addresses now. For cloud systems, ownership of an IP could be a few hours.
This has almost certainly been deemed an acceptable risk.
> IP address certificates allow server operators to authenticate TLS connections to IP addresses rather than domain names. Let’s Encrypt supports both IPv4 and IPv6. IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important.
https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...
Tangential, but I love the design of your blog. That's so freakishly accurate to old GNOME 2 Ubuntu, amazing work.
Not sure if there is a great solution, but I'm inclined to say that attack traffic like this is the new normal. In fact, the attack volume they got is quite small compared to the volume I have seen on other tech company subdomains - the new normal is probably much worse.
Any responsible bug bounty researcher reviewing the DNS zone by hand would spot the CNAME and remove it from the target list. You don't get to wash your hands of that because your chatbot did it.
I think this line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. The internet is not an inherently safe network regardless of what we wish for; we can't wish away the bad activity, and it's only going to increase. The activity that helps prevent the bad activity from working is a net positive.
I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare viewing a couple of pages once a day with running scripting tools against over 400 websites.
> I think this line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. The internet is not an inherently safe network regardless of what we wish for; we can't wish away the bad activity, and it's only going to increase. The activity that helps prevent the bad activity from working is a net positive.
Oh good, no one has ever claimed "it's for your own good" when doing something selfish without consent.
They look to all be log4j vuln scanning activity (CVE-2021-44228), and the volume isn't that high (a few a day, and not every day). They just have some overzealous vuln scanning. And yes, they shouldn't have the NTP pool under their DNS name.
I've had all sorts of strange things happen because of my ntp pool membership, this one is pretty far on the benign end of things.
I understand that Tesla is treating your NTP server, a volunteer server and part of the greater volunteer pool of NTP servers, as their own infrastructure.
However, I can't tell from the article if the scans originate with:
A.) IT staff at Tesla that are scanning exposed services on what they perceive, or claim wrongly, as their own network for vulnerabilities.
B.) Somehow a rogue operator (read botnet)
C.) A rogue operator who is using the cars themselves to run exploit scans?
C would be the most alarming and concerning.
Neat! Didn’t know about this command that’s very helpful
Akamai, APNIC Foundation, Arctic Security, AusCERT, Avast, Backblaze, Canadian Center for Cyber Security, CERT.AT, CERT.br, CERT.LV, CIRA, CIRCL, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, CSIRT.LI, CSIS Security Group, DFN‑CSIRT, Digital Trust Center, EURid, HelseCERT, ICANN, Identity Digital, KPN, Mastercard, NASK (CERT.pl), NCSC Ireland, NICS, Nihon Cyber Defence, Nucleus Security, Orange Polska, Precursor Security, Protect.ngo, Public Interest Registry (PIR), Red Hat, SURFcert, SWITCH, Team Cymru, Trend Micro, Trivest AG, Tucows, Verisign, VulnCheck,
I don't care what they say they're doing, I hate how corporations can act with impunity with these types of things while everyone else would get a felony for it.
Because that is exactly what all of these vulnerability scanning companies are doing, and all of us sort of just… let them.
I have personally done this before, the correct sequence of moves is:
1. Call your neighbor, ask for permission. 2. Check the door 3. Lock the door
If you don’t have their phone number, you are not on good enough terms to touch their lock.
Having one person with poor computer security negatively impacts everyone. Hacked sites turn into phishing landing pages, exploit kit hosting, stolen data dumps, and launching off points for attacks on everyone else. The vuln scanning ShadowServer is doing is meant to be a public good, which is why they share the info with ISPs and governments.
Security is too intertwined to stand by and say other people's vulnerabilities aren't your problem.
And even if you remove the analogy, ShadowServer means good, but good intentions doesn’t necessarily make their action moral or legal.
Yes, compromised servers can be used by hackers as means to commit crimes. But when these groups scan the entire internet, they do cause harm as well, as shown in the original linked article. Much less harm than a black hat, but they still waste time and resources from innocent third parties.
It’s fair to ask if the harm they cause is worth the good they do.
Other than not, with these huge companies you have 0 recourse.
Meta not only hasn't noticed, but is currently sending about 11 requests per second to my site. I've also seemingly trapped one of those TV proxy scraper nets as I'm getting absolutely hammered by requests from all over the place now. I get maybe 10 legit visitors per day, and I'm currently blocking 406,787 IPs from things that have fallen into my honeypot.
I've tweaked my site to return empty status responses a configurable amount of time but the traffic has been so intense that Traefik is now struggling, so I'm going to have to figure out something else. I was returning over-capacity errors and I think that was a mistake, I've swapped to 400 range status codes now. I don't want to use Cloudflare so I'm not sure what to do after this.
The people at these companies are either incompetent or malicious.
Might make them scan themselves instead.
Once the asset scanner detects the vulns, everyone will kick into high gear to patch this.
"Hey Texas Model S #345 just left KXYZ, moving at >100mph towards the pad. Everyone get cameras out!"
It'll be gone by lunchtime that day.
One's best bet is to play possum, and use your clients last login IPs falling in your service area geo-IP ranges for a firewall white-list. Then redirect the other traffic for a black hole route.
If the nuisance hosts assume they have driven the host offline, they will eventually give up and move on. =3
As opposed to intentionally being a nuisance?
I see this in cyber clients that are perpetually short staffed and simply accept the degraded system because the consequences are minimal. If nothing important breaks, nothing changes.
Edit: tamping down a bit of my prickliness because it looks like this individual is a relative newcomer to running internet-facing services. This is actually a pretty good intro to that: the place as a whole is a cesspool and any conceivable “attack”, scan, probe, pentest is, has, or will be happening at all times. Some you can mitigate yourself, others you’ll need to bring in a specialist service (see DDoS sinks and mitigation services, for example) or contact someone’s abuse address, others you just have to ignore because it’s just not directed at you personally, or just not worth more than three seconds’ thought beyond a firewall rule. This is the latter. Maybe interesting if this is the first time you’re seeing something like this, but for more grizzled operators like myself, it doesn’t even register as notable anymore.
This is standard bot crawler traffic. Anyone who runs a home server sees attempts to load wp paths all the time
> Speculation: Assetnote pulled in everything it could find under tesla.com, including pool-ntp.tesla.com, which CNAMEs to pool.ntp.org, which can resolve to my machine — 67.215.249.229. The asset inventory saves this as a Tesla asset, and starts throwing exploits at me, a stranger.
> Not a vuln in Tesla, and I'm not asking for anything, but I just wanted to let you know that you may unintentionally be being a nuisance.
This happens EVERY day to EVERY web server out there. I have a personal site that gets thousands of requests per day from bots.
Running a public server (like NTP) means you will get tons of strange requests. Moreso if you run a web server on the same IP because bots will scrape certificate transparency logs. The entire IPv4 space is scanned continuously.
This may sound harsh, but you cannot stop it. It is whack-a-mole. Filter it and move on, go outside and touch grass, seriously. This is not worth being upset over.
I treat these as an opportunity to tune my filters and firewall rules.
No, I do not.
I get thousands of these "security scanner" requests on a low-traffic site weekly, if not daily. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't try to kick in my door. Are you prepared to waste valuable time in your life to separate the white hat from the black hat requests?
I would have added the IP addresses to my firewall's IP blacklist and forgotten about it the next day. It's really all you can do.
Tesla is a large enterprise.
They almost certainly subscribe to some overpriced SaaS garbage which is manned by offshore drones who by definition do not care because they're not paid enough to care.
Unfortunately this isn't the 80s anymore where you can ring up a system administrator at a university and get a human on the other end.
That said: cool looking website btw.
If it were 8000 requests per second, this might be worthy of some investigation.
But 8000 ntp requests alone consume far less than 1 us cent of compute + bandwidth. This isn't worth lifting a finger over.
"They tried all kinds of exploits against me: path traversal, webshell uploads, probing software internals, probing WordPress and other CMS management endpoints, SSRF, Log4Shell, and a lot more."
I don't go complaining on the internet about the absolute shitflood of compromised routers on broadband ISPs in Indonesia probing my stuff 24x7x365 because I know it would be futile. But if I found one specific american company that was repeatedly probing my stuff all the time? Maybe I'd escalate it.
The scanner is likely illegal.
The pointing is… so stupid nobody thought to make a law about it.