Anonymous Temporary Storage and Retrieval

by Buanzo

Hello hackers all over the world!

I am not sure if this technique is well known.  As far as I can tell, no one is using it (probably for a reason), but I have not seen it covered, so here it goes.

People tend to use sites such as Pastebin and other websites to post information to.  Some time ago, I was wondering about different methods for saving data to "the Internet" without having to register, validate I'm not a bot, etc.  So my mind wandered a bit...

"What gets written all over the Internet, directly or indirectly?"

Log files.

So a simple Google Dork for "access_log" and "index of" provided me with a nice bunch of servers publishing HTTP server access_log.

And yes, I could create an interesting URL...  For instance:

www.example.com/THIS_DOES_NOT_EXIST_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_ARBITRARY_DATA...

And yes, I would find a matching 404 for:

"/THIS_DOES_NOT_EXIST_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_ARBITRARY_DATA..."

in "www.example.com/logs/access_log".

Add some Tor there...  And presto, you have a way to store data.  Add some crypto, some structure...  And there you go, a way to store information for along time (Google cache, Wayback Machine, etc.) without having to do anything but a simple HTTP GET.

I might put some tools up on GitHub, but please go ahead and have fun with this extremely simple method.

Cheers!