Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

Ex Vaddio PM here. Like 5 years ago all our firmware defaulted to requiring non-default passwords on setup. We also created a free windows application that can mass upgrade firmware and change auth if defaults were used. We tried!

Saw the Vaddio logo and had to chime in. Gotta stick up for my Minnesota devs.

The PTR record enumeration trick is often fun to try on hotel and other public networks.

The problem here is that many places segment their guest network away from the internal one, but they use the same DNS server for both, so guests can still resolve internal hostnames and perform rev DNS queries.

I usually like to run a traceroute or two (to some arbitrary external IP like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8) whenever I connect to a new network. As traceroute does rev dns by default, if you see the internal hostname for your default gateway (and possibly other hosts inbetween you and the wider internet), those IPs are likely good starting points for your rev DNS shenanigans.

> At some point, I hit a threshold where the DNS server could no longer keep up and broke. As I later found out, this caused a ~15 minute campus wide outage for managed computers as no computer could make the DNS lookup in order to mount its network drive. IT politely told me to stop spamming the DNS server after this, so I did.

> How’d IT know it was me? I yapped about it for two weeks!

You know, I think maybe the first part is how they found out about you, rather than that they just happened to follow you on social media :)

The font size on this site is massive and zooming out causes the font to resize back to the same massive font size.

Why?! ;_;

Even running a port scanner is enough to face disciplinary action at many US colleges. Taking down the network for the entire school for 15 minutes surely deserved more consequences than were doled out here. I'd encourage the author to focus their efforts and talents on something more constructive.

Seems a bit too irresponsible and immature for my taste.

I am a bit confused on how they were able to access these devices if they stated the network is not allowing routing? I think I may've missed that part in the article.

> AI usage

> I used ai for a single rust scope issue that google wasn’t giving me clear answers for.

Nowadays, this needs to be highlighted. Congrats

Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.

Hey, fancy seeing you up here on HN! Fun article

very nice article!

nice writeup. might be a bit careful though, as far as i know port scanning might be technically not allowed by your campus's it policy... nonetheless great job!

Did you play the Gandalf smiling video across all projectors?

Banger