February 4, 2026
Your NAS is showing
When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
Home server owner tries to be sneaky, Internet clown immediately doxxes his “secret” box
TLDR: A home user discovered that a supposedly secret name for their private storage box was somehow reaching outside servers, likely via built-in error reporting, freaking out privacy-conscious commenters. The community is split between laughing at the clown jokes and warning that our “private” devices may be quietly snitching on us to the Internet.
A quiet home tech project just turned into a horror movie, and the monster is… error tracking software. A blogger set up a “hidden” storage box at home, buried behind a long, boring name only their own laptop knew about. But every time they opened it, a mystery computer out on Google’s cloud came knocking on that same secret door. The twist? The only place that name existed was on their personal machine.
The community instantly turned it into clown-themed nightmare fuel. One commenter joked, “Pennywise found my hostname? We’re cooked,” turning the whole thing into IT: The Sysadmin Edition. Others were less amused and more alarmed, saying this shows just how creepy the modern Internet has become — name a box anything sensitive, like “secret-merger-files,” and you might as well shout it into a megaphone.
Then the nerd fight began. Some insisted the real villain is public certificate logs, which list server names and attract hackers like flies. Others said the blog is blaming the wrong thing and demanded proof that the error tracking site is actually leaking or poking these home servers. In classic fashion, half the crowd is laughing, half is paranoid, and everyone is suddenly side-eyeing their “totally private” gadgets at home.
Key Points
- •A home NAS was accessed via HTTPS using a wildcard TLS certificate and a hosts file entry for a private hostname.
- •A wildcard DNS trap for the subdomain revealed external requests referencing the internal-only hostname.
- •Each NAS UI load triggered a GCP host to make a TLS connection presenting the internal hostname through SNI.
- •The NAS web interface sent stack traces to sentry.io, including the internal hostname, leading to external TLS connections.
- •The author mitigated the leak by blocking sentry.io with Little Snitch and notes the potential for abuse of such reporting mechanisms.