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.

My guess is that this is actually what happened here: Some carrier or VoIP software leaking its DNS queries to the public internet because the service is using is only set up to respond for e.g. NANP (+1) number ranges and the rest is falling through to the public (and largely unused) ENUM.

Whew, absolutely!

I love the line near the end of the article: "So in the end, I was down 10€ in domain fees, there was sadly no bug bounty (I thankfully didn't get my door kicked in at least)."

Makes me cringe, imagining what that would be like.

Given the author appears to be a 19 year old German girl, UK bureaucrats proxying admin duties for offshore territories are unlikely to be motivated to start an international extradition for what amounts to a helpful tip.

neocities exploded 2-3 years ago and #smallweb is super active

loads of webrings also started -- 90s internet is back, just look for it <3

There are various subcultures outside the mainstream part of the internet that largely eschew modern web design. Not entirely dissimilar to HN itself.

Its hip again on some parts of the fediverse.

Just 19 too, what a talent!

You never know in Germany. Jail time might still be looming.. after some 3-5 years of delay because the telefax machine at the public prosecutors office is currently broken (and not even for DNS reasons!)

Fortunately it was the national defense of a different country (UK and not germany) so that might have helped.

People with POTS brains trying to make them do Internet things leads to a neverending stream of bad... no actually, terrible ideas. Look at H.323 for example, something that could only be created by someone who has no clue how the Internet (with firewalls, NAT, etc) works, and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the ITU-T standards stream.

Having said that, SIP is barely better.

I just finished that recently, I think "A Shadow Intelligence" from the same author is even better so can recommend that too.

Although you can run SIP over TLS (for signalling) and use SRTP for media (key exchange done over the aforementioned signalling channel), in practice most SIP is over unencrypted UDP and media is unencrypted RTP.

If you control both endpoints and they support it you can configure them to use encryption, but even then implementation qualities vary widely (just because you enable SIP over TLS doesn’t mean they’ll actually verify the certificates for example - giving you at best opportunistic encryption), and I bet a lot of the implementations also have bugs/vulnerabilities.

If security is needed, it is often implemented by way of running the whole thing over private links (which can be secured with IPSec or any other VPN technology). In fact that’s presumably what’s happening, but misconfigured equipment making those ENUM lookups would allow the attacker to steer the traffic away from the secure link and towards an endpoint they control over the public internet.

I know opinions about Mitnick are quite divided. But I enjoyed reading "Ghost in the Wires" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wi...). It's giving this 90s-era hacker vibe that's kinda fun (even if the truth might be stretched a bit).

VoIP phones or telecom software

The article covers it, but to reiterate. Yes, The idea is to have a mechanism to map phone numbers to hosts.

The normal path for voip phones given a phone number is to end up at a sip trunk provider go over the traditional phone network (which at this point probably routes over the internet anyway) hit another sip trunk and end up at the receiving sip phone.

This provides a method to bypass the traditional phone network and go directly over the internet. The sip phone looks up the host responsible for that phone number and directly connects. The sip providers would be responsible for maintaining this number to host mapping in dns.

When you think about it DNS is really just a big distributed phone book, a key value store to look up numbers based on names. The reverse records are a method to look up names based on numbers using that same distributed architecture.

There is also an interesting legacy architecture interaction here, traditional phones can only enter numbers. Cell phones could use dns names directly(but don't) or we could use ip addresses as a sort of modern phone number(but don't), The whole world was connected via phone numbers and that is now how we expect phones to operate.

If the phone is behind a NAT firewall / router it may need external help to receive calls: https://support.aa.net.uk/VoIP_NAT

Where else would they be calling on Diego Garcia apart from the military base?

The poster knows the phone numbers that were called. It doesn’t seem difficult to check who owns the numbers.

Not really. It's a pretty logical assumption. It sounds as if you might not be familiar with Diego Garcia?