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Forum Discussion
AEtherScythe
Apr 25, 2021Aspirant
Nighthawk MR60 spying on my Internet usage
I installed a new Nighthawk AX1800 WiFi 6 Mesh System only to find that it is now the top user of DNS in my network and it's looking up the hostname of every IP any of my devices visit on the interne...
AEtherScythe
Apr 26, 2021Aspirant
To get more insight into what is going on here, I grabbed the /var/log/pihole.log* files for the last 7 days and checked just what the MR60 (as client 192.168.1.2) is trying to resolve. The list is pretty "telling." It's definitely doing all the queries that any/all of my devices are doing, but also a huge number of reverse IP lookups.
$ grep 'from 192.168.1.2' pihole.log* | sed -n 's/.*] \([^ ]*\) from.*/\1/p' | sort | uniq -c | tee mr60.txt
I'll show just the most-used lookups. For sure many of these are Netgear related, but a ton of them are not.
And when I look at the complete list I can see many many domains being referenced which are unique to my own Internet usage, such as certain podcasts and such that only I listen to and nobody else does.
5419 www.netgear.com
1516 time-b.netgear.com
1031 advisor.ngxcld.com
186 mesu.apple.com
126 www.apple.com
121 time-c.netgear.com
117 init-p01st.push.apple.com
92 lb._dns-sd._udp.net
88 1-courier.push.apple.com
85 1-courier.sandbox.push.apple.com
69 apple.com
62 suconfig.apple.com
56 xbroker-z2-i12.ngxcld.com
52 xbroker-z2-i16.ngxcld.com
52 api.smoot.apple.com
51 gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com
51 e6858.dscx.akamaiedge.net
50 gsa.apple.com
48 cl2.apple.com
48 appleid.apple.com
46 xbroker-z2-i17.ngxcld.com
44 xbroker-z2-i24.ngxcld.com
43 init-p01md.apple.com
43 init.ess.apple.com
42 gs-loc.apple.com
42 gateway.icloud.com
41 uemm.dynatrace.ford.com
40 xbroker-z2-i8.ngxcld.com
40 xbroker-z2-i11.ngxcld.com
40 guzzoni.apple.com
38 xbroker-z2-i22.ngxcld.com
38 xbroker-z2-i13.ngxcld.com
38 radarsubmissions.apple.com
37 outlook.office365.com
37 gsp-ssl.ls.apple.com
36 init.itunes.apple.com
35 configuration.apple.com
34 xbroker-z2-i23.ngxcld.com
34 xbroker-z2-i15.ngxcld.com
33 p101-keyvalueservice.icloud.com
33 p101-fmfmobile.icloud.com
33 http.fw.updates1.netgear.com
32 xbroker-z2-i6.ngxcld.com
32 xbroker-z2-i4.ngxcld.com
32 xbroker-z2-i14.ngxcld.com
31 gateway.fe.apple-dns.net
30 xbroker-z2-i7.ngxcld.com
30 xbroker-z2-i19.ngxcld.com
30 gspe35-ssl.ls.apple.com
28 xbroker-z2-i5.ngxcld.com
Looking into the top reverse lookups it's almost all cloudfront:
$ cat /tmp/mr60arpa.txt | while read count rev ; do ip=$(echo $rev | awk -F. '{print $4 "." $3 "." $2 "." $1}'); echo $count $(getent hosts $ip) ; done
1121 13.226.13.13 server-13-226-13-13.ord51.r.cloudfront.net
1121 13.226.13.120 server-13-226-13-120.ord51.r.cloudfront.net
1120 13.226.13.99 server-13-226-13-99.ord51.r.cloudfront.net
1120 13.226.13.124 server-13-226-13-124.ord51.r.cloudfront.net
660 99.84.160.7 server-99-84-160-7.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
660 99.84.160.32 server-99-84-160-32.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
660 99.84.160.25 server-99-84-160-25.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
660 99.84.160.115 server-99-84-160-115.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
180 99.84.174.69 server-99-84-174-69.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
180 99.84.174.66 server-99-84-174-66.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
180 99.84.174.6 server-99-84-174-6.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
180 99.84.174.22 server-99-84-174-22.ord52.r.cloudfront.net
1 99.84.79.90 server-99-84-79-90.hio50.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.239.169.81 server-54-239-169-81.kix56.r.cloudfront.net
1 13.33.165.77 server-13-33-165-77.yto50.r.cloudfront.net
1 99.84.79.70 server-99-84-79-70.hio50.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.230.155.66 server-54-230-155-66.icn51.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.239.169.58 server-54-239-169-58.kix56.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.230.155.52 server-54-230-155-52.icn51.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.230.155.50 server-54-230-155-50.icn51.r.cloudfront.net
1 13.33.165.49 server-13-33-165-49.yto50.r.cloudfront.net
1 99.84.79.2 server-99-84-79-2.hio50.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.230.155.23 server-54-230-155-23.icn51.r.cloudfront.net
1 13.33.165.2 server-13-33-165-2.yto50.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.239.169.123 server-54-239-169-123.kix56.r.cloudfront.net
1 13.33.165.107 server-13-33-165-107.yto50.r.cloudfront.net
1 54.239.169.102 server-54-239-169-102.kix56.r.cloudfront.net
1 99.84.79.101 server-99-84-79-101.hio50.r.cloudfront.net
That's just the IPv4 stuff. I need to see if I can do similar analysis for the IPv6 lookups.