Category Archives: Google

The AI Fix #36: A DeepSeek special

In episode 36 of The AI Fix, Graham and Mark take a long look at DeepSeek, an upstart AI out of China that was trained on a shoestring, shook up Wall Street, kneecapped Nvidia, and challenged America's AI hegemony.Graham also discovers a remarkably f***ing effective way to remove AI snippets, a personal mobility robot gets a bit over-excited, some aliens regret installing an FTP server, and Mark explains what o3-mini owes to Spinal Tap.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years

The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.

A DNS lookup on the domain az.mastercard.com on Jan. 14, 2025 shows the mistyped domain name a22-65.akam.ne.

From June 30, 2020 until January 14, 2025, one of the core Internet servers that MasterCard uses to direct traffic for portions of the mastercard.com network was misnamed. MasterCard.com relies on five shared Domain Name System (DNS) servers at the Internet infrastructure provider Akamai [DNS acts as a kind of Internet phone book, by translating website names to numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to manage].

All of the Akamai DNS server names that MasterCard uses are supposed to end in “akam.net” but one of them was misconfigured to rely on the domain “akam.ne.”

This tiny but potentially critical typo was discovered recently by Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys. Caturegli said he guessed that nobody had yet registered the domain akam.ne, which is under the purview of the top-level domain authority for the West Africa nation of Niger.

Caturegli said it took $300 and nearly three months of waiting to secure the domain with the registry in Niger. After enabling a DNS server on akam.ne, he noticed hundreds of thousands of DNS requests hitting his server each day from locations around the globe. Apparently, MasterCard wasn’t the only organization that had fat-fingered a DNS entry to include “akam.ne,” but they were by far the largest.

Had he enabled an email server on his new domain akam.ne, Caturegli likely would have received wayward emails directed toward mastercard.com or other affected domains. If he’d abused his access, he probably could have obtained website encryption certificates (SSL/TLS certs) that were authorized to accept and relay web traffic for affected websites. He may even have been able to passively receive Microsoft Windows authentication credentials from employee computers at affected companies.

But the researcher said he didn’t attempt to do any of that. Instead, he alerted MasterCard that the domain was theirs if they wanted it, copying this author on his notifications. A few hours later, MasterCard acknowledged the mistake, but said there was never any real threat to the security of its operations.

“We have looked into the matter and there was not a risk to our systems,” a MasterCard spokesperson wrote. “This typo has now been corrected.”

Meanwhile, Caturegli received a request submitted through Bugcrowd, a program that offers financial rewards and recognition to security researchers who find flaws and work privately with the affected vendor to fix them. The message suggested his public disclosure of the MasterCard DNS error via a post on LinkedIn (after he’d secured the akam.ne domain) was not aligned with ethical security practices, and passed on a request from MasterCard to have the post removed.

MasterCard’s request to Caturegli, a.k.a. “Titon” on infosec.exchange.

Caturegli said while he does have an account on Bugcrowd, he has never submitted anything through the Bugcrowd program, and that he reported this issue directly to MasterCard.

“I did not disclose this issue through Bugcrowd,” Caturegli wrote in reply. “Before making any public disclosure, I ensured that the affected domain was registered to prevent exploitation, mitigating any risk to MasterCard or its customers. This action, which we took at our own expense, demonstrates our commitment to ethical security practices and responsible disclosure.”

Most organizations have at least two authoritative domain name servers, but some handle so many DNS requests that they need to spread the load over additional DNS server domains. In MasterCard’s case, that number is five, so it stands to reason that if an attacker managed to seize control over just one of those domains they would only be able to see about one-fifth of the overall DNS requests coming in.

But Caturegli said the reality is that many Internet users are relying at least to some degree on public traffic forwarders or DNS resolvers like Cloudflare and Google.

“So all we need is for one of these resolvers to query our name server and cache the result,” Caturegli said. By setting their DNS server records with a long TTL or “Time To Live” — a setting that can adjust the lifespan of data packets on a network — an attacker’s poisoned instructions for the target domain can be propagated by large cloud providers.

“With a long TTL, we may reroute a LOT more than just 1/5 of the traffic,” he said.

The researcher said he’d hoped that the credit card giant might thank him, or at least offer to cover the cost of buying the domain.

“We obviously disagree with this assessment,” Caturegli wrote in a follow-up post on LinkedIn regarding MasterCard’s public statement. “But we’ll let you judge— here are some of the DNS lookups we recorded before reporting the issue.”

Caturegli posted this screenshot of MasterCard domains that were potentially at risk from the misconfigured domain.

As the screenshot above shows, the misconfigured DNS server Caturegli found involved the MasterCard subdomain az.mastercard.com. It is not clear exactly how this subdomain is used by MasterCard, however their naming conventions suggest the domains correspond to production servers at Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Caturegli said the external Internet address of these servers is mostly Cloudflare, but internally the domains all resolve to Internet addresses at Microsoft.

“Don’t be like Mastercard,” Caturegli concluded in his LinkedIn post. “Don’t dismiss risk, and don’t let your marketing team handle security disclosures.”

One final note: The domain akam.ne has been registered previously — in December 2016 by someone using the email address um-i-delo@yandex.ru. The Russian search giant Yandex reports this user account belongs to an “Ivan I.” from Moscow. Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show that between 2016 and 2018 the domain was connected to an Internet server in Germany, and that the domain was left to expire in 2018.

This is interesting given a comment on Caturegli’s LinkedIn post from an ex-Cloudflare employee who linked to a report he co-authored on a similar typo domain apparently registered in 2017 for organizations that may have mistyped their AWS DNS server as “awsdns-06.ne” instead of “awsdns-06.net.” DomainTools reports that this typo domain also was registered to a Yandex user (playlotto@yandex.ru), and was hosted at the same German ISP — Team Internet (AS61969).

The AI Fix #30: ChatGPT reveals the devastating truth about Santa (Merry Christmas!)

In episode 30 of The AI Fix, AIs are caught lying to avoid being turned off, Apple’s AI flubs a headline, ChatGPT is available to people who haven't left the 1970s, our hosts regret to inform you that an AI artist now has a personality, and ant-like robots join forces to lob each other over things.Graham discovers that Google Gemini is checking its homework by asking unskilled humans to simply take a punt at the right answer, and Mark uses an AI to reveal the devastating truth about Santa.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

The AI Fix #30: ChatGPT reveals the devastating truth about Santa (Merry Christmas!)

In episode 30 of The AI Fix, AIs are caught lying to avoid being turned off, Apple’s AI flubs a headline, ChatGPT is available to people who haven't left the 1970s, our hosts regret to inform you that an AI artist now has a personality, and ant-like robots join forces to lob each other over things.Graham discovers that Google Gemini is checking its homework by asking unskilled humans to simply take a punt at the right answer, and Mark uses an AI to reveal the devastating truth about Santa.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

The AI Fix #26: Would AI kill sentient robots, and is water wet?

In episode 26 of The AI Fix, an AI does surgery on pork chops, holographic Jesus wants your consent to use cookies, Mark opens the pod bay doors, our hosts discover OpenAI's couch potato health coach, and Graham finds a robot made of drain pipes.Graham pits Mark against an AI in a morality quiz that asks “would you kill sentient robots?”, and “are lobsters more delicious than cats?”, while a surprisingly useful answer from ChatGPT leads Mark on a quest for world peace.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

The AI Fix #25: Beware of the superintelligence, and a spam-eating AI super gran

In episode 25 of The AI Fix, humanity creates a satellite called Skynet and then loses it, Graham folds proteins in the comfort of his living room, a Florida man gets a robot dog, Grok rats on its own boss, and a podcast host discovers Brazil nuts.Graham meets an elderly grandmother who's taking on the AI scammers, our hosts learn why Google is listening to phone calls, and Mark looks at how OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to prevent “large scale devastation” by their own AIs.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

The AI Fix #24: Where are the alien AIs, and are we being softened up for superintelligence?

In episode 24 of The AI Fix, Mark makes an unforgivable error about the Terminator franchise, our hosts wonder if a "seductive" government chatbot will make it easier to talk about tax, a radio station abandons its three month AI experiment after a week, and OpenAI parks its tanks on Google’s lawn.Graham gets cosmic and wonders why we aren’t surrounded by advanced alien AIs, our hosts argue about whether the moon landings or the invention of the cheese sandwich were more consequential events in human history, and Mark tells Graham that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner.All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of "The AI Fix" podcast by Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.