I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

> 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/ENUM 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.

I'm mostly amazed the author didn't land in jail, which is the normally the response to reporting this kind of thing to authorities.

It is a shame they did not actually set up a SIP server and see if any of those requests turned into actual call terminations.

There is another schema called TRIP [1] - telephony routing over ip that uses a number format "1234*1455" designed to be entered on a standard phone keypad. When I registered my ITAD (internet telephony administrative domain, the RHS of a TRIP number) I was lucky enough to get one that matches my local dialling code!

https://tripresurgence.org/trip/history/ [1]

It's funny how such holes can remain for years, and no one notices until someone stumbles upon them. It's interesting that no serious organization wanted to address the issue until it was discovered that the military was involved.

It's a shame the author wasn't rewarded but at least the story can now be told over a beer.

I enjoyed reading this much more than anything I read here recently. In particular I like how it absolutely shows that somethings just… fall through the cracks!

Their homepage, https://lina.sh/, reminds me of the early days of the internet. Are webrings back in fashion? Or is this just a group of old school folks keeping the nostalgia alive?

Man, you really got lucky they didn’t throw you in jail. Anything related to national defense is pretty scary. Do you think you might get some kind of reward for exposing this vulnerability?

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.

So what software could be making these ENUM queries? Any theories?

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.

Great story. Gives me nostalgia for the old days of the internet.

Amazed enum.org.uk hasn’t been scooped by a bot. 4 letters are £££.

Now a question daunted on me. Assuming away strategies like store-and-decrypt-later-in-a-quantum-future, could a MITM really eavesdrop, as in, aren’t such ARPA-routed phone calls encrypted?

Now THIS is what hacking is all about. Very cool.

wow incredible story! Reminds me of phone phreaking stories from decades 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.

Why is a phone call making a DNS query?

Is this related to Softphone / VOIP in any way?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

There was a startup called WUPHF that used some telecom wizardry to multicast messages between providers given a single identifier, I'm not sure what happened to it...

Can confirm. Work for a major telco and we use ENUM internally.

Amazed enum.org.uk hasn’t been scooped by a bot. 4 letters are £££.

It's a shame the author wasn't rewarded but at least the story can now be told over a beer.

I'm mostly amazed the author didn't land in jail, which is the normally the response to reporting this kind of thing to authorities.

Great story. Gives me nostalgia for the old days of the internet.

I enjoyed reading this much more than anything I read here recently. In particular I like how it absolutely shows that somethings just… fall through the cracks!

So what software could be making these ENUM queries? Any theories?

wow incredible story! Reminds me of phone phreaking stories from decades ago!

Now THIS is what hacking is all about. Very cool.

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.