I remember back in the old days on the Eve Online forums when the word cockpit would always turn up as "c***pit". I was quite amused by that.
replyThis is actually a better solution, replacing dangerous words with placeholders, instead of blocking the whole payload. That at least gives the user some indication of what is going on. Not that I'm for any such WAF filters in the first place, just if having to choose between the lesser of two evils I'd choose the more informative.
replyNot so sure. Imagine you have a base64 encoded payload and it just happens to encode the forbidden word. Good luck debugging that, if the payload only gets silently modified.
replyI suddenly understand why it makes sense to integrity-check a payload that is already protected by all three of TLS, TCP checksum and CRC.
Good point, i take take that back. Having payload mutated would indeed be even more scary. Even more so if it actually contains real queries, imagine what could happen if /etc/hosts becomes /etc/*.
replySee also: Recent scrubbing US government web sites for words like "diversity", "equity", and "inclusion".
replyWriting about biology, finance, or geology? Shrug.
Dumb filtering is bad enough when used by smart people with good intent.
Huh, quick tell one Musk's DOGE l33t h4ck3ers about reverse proxies, and put all government sites behind one, that looks for those words and returns an error... Error 451 would be the most appropriate!
replyFor bonus, the reverse proxy will run on a system infiltrated by Russian (why not Chinese as well) hackers.
It is time to add the Substack case to this Wikipedia article.
reply"I wonder why it's called Scunthorpe....?"
replysits quietly for a second
"Oh nnnnnnnooooooooooooooo lol!"