Aug 21, 2026, 11:10 AMnew blog post!
https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
i hijacked some telephone infrastructure of a few islands over the span of multiple months; and accidentally logged information of a few hundreds of thousands of phone calls going to military bases in the process..
it's a really really silly story :P
Aug 21, 2026, 12:13 PM@lina @nyanbinary wonder how often this sort of thing silently happens and we just never hear about it, because the actor sits on it instead of making a splash.
@lina which denic member did you use to register your e164.arpa-domain? I looked on some websites of the members in the e164-list and none of them had any information about e164-domains…
Aug 21, 2026, 12:36 PM@lina silly story, awesome writeup! thanks for the research and the lulz
@lina wow crazy! thank you for that silly story :blahaj:
@lina@ohai.social once again, the world's cybersecurity is held firm by inquisitive queers
@lina Can you hack into the system and remove the cluster bomb supply chain?.. cuz this is quickly becoming a clusterfuck.
@pluralistic Wild stuff
@lina Great explainer and funny/silly as a bonus. DNS. It's always DNS.
@lina it was interesting until you revealed the countries, then it got real interesting
Aug 21, 2026, 4:12 PM@lina @LockEx ice just read it on @heiseonline (https://www.heise.de/en/background/ENUM-domains-hijacked-How-a-hacker-almost-eavesdropped-on-military-calls-11422018.html ) and wondered if the one who found this flaw was on my timeline.
Anyway: very interesting! 👍🏻
@lina So the UK NCSC can now MitM calls to the US base on Diego Garcia?
Could be useful...
@lina great read.
holy moly.
It's scary AND silly!
@lina Thanks for the writeup and explanation of what you did. I’ve worked with DNS for decades and did some experiments with public ENUM back in the 2000s when it was all new.. and I am sadly not surprised by the neglect you found.
Public ENUM was an interesting idea… but the ease for spammers to call people by just walking the DNS tree doomed it (there was even a script that made that trivial).
Now, *private* ENUM inside telcos was a HUGE usage. Probably still is!
Aug 21, 2026, 10:14 PMAug 21, 2026, 11:45 PM
@lina nice work and a great story, thanks for sharing!
@lina I think the part that surprises me most is that the local numbering system was still being used.
US activity in the area has, since the beginning, been very, very, focused on having a base without any neighbors or locals. Given what else they were wiling to do to get that done; my guess would have been that all the telephone numbering is done as though the place is an area code a county over from Maclean VA or a similar domestic fed hotspot, with the existence of +246 basically ignored.
@lina interesting story