Bypass Palo Alto company firewall

This has nothing to do with selfhosting, this is a 100% security/hacker related question.

Stop trying to access non-related work things on corporate networks! Use you own travelling router/mobile tethering etc

If you're abusing this policy also now anything you do/create on "their" computers is/can be visible to them and in the case of creation they can claim IP!

I really hope you get a warning for the behaviour... you are endangering the company and explicity circumvent policies.... this is not OK.

Do this on your own equipment, not behind a company firewall.

Tunnel ssh over http! As long as your remote web server is not blocked it will work!

You shouldn't be handling your personnal work on the work machine. Who knows they kight have other tools installed as well to monitor the activity.

I've worked in a similar environment before ... Maybe my approach will work?

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

But I used MacOS and Linux for this. Or more specifically: The OpenSSH clients and tools such as "nc" (BSD NetCat) these OS come with. The only way I ever managed to reproduce this on Windows 10 back then was via using CygWin ...

Also: you'd need an OpenSSH server (BSD, Linux, MacOS ... these days Windows 10/11 would probably work too) somewhere somehow outside your company network, e.g. at home. I always used my own little Linux server at home for this.

So what I write here is with OpenSSH and "nc" (BSD NetCat) in mind.

Let's also assume that I want to access a remotely running RDP-server in my LAN (could be Windows, could be Linux via "xrdp" ... e.g. because I don't want my browsing history on my local company web browser ...)

Thus:

ssh -p $REMOTESSHPORT -L 3389:192.168.1.39:3389 user@remote -o "ProxyCommand=nc -X connect -x proxy.hostname.net:$PROXYPORT %h %p"

=> the RDP server (port 3389/tcp) running on my LAN host "192.168.1.39" becomes available as "localhost:3389" on my end, thanks to this SSH connection. And it will remain available for as long as this connection stays open.

Filled with actual numbers and names this could look like this:

ssh -p 2243 -L 3389:192.168.1.39:3389 myuser@myhost.athome.ddns-domain.nu -o "ProxyCommand=nc -X connect -x clientproxy.corporation.net:8079 %h %p"

Why port "-p 2243" => my router at home is set to port-forward SSH from 2243 to 22; I don't use the standard port 22 on the outside because there are too many script-kiddies out there who otherwise keep hammering that port with login attempts... Not that I am worried (I do SSH-key based logins and not password-based logins ...) but I just find the flood of failed login attempts annoying. So I moved the SSH port to something above 1024.

How this works:

What happens here is that the "nc" tool will first pretend to be a standard SSL client (e.g. a web browser wishing to communicate via "https" ...) and connect to the corporate web proxy on the port the proxy expects ("8079/tcp" in my example) ... and then keep the connection open. And then the actual SSH connection goes through that tunnel and connects to my actual target host: my machine at home.

In case you don't have an OS with BSD's flavour of "nc" (BSD NetCat) but something that uses e.g. Red Hat's "socat" instead: The syntax changes.

ssh -p 2243 -L 3389:192.168.1.39:3389 myuser@myhost.athome.ddns-domain.nu -o "ProxyCommand=socat - PROXY:clientproxy.corporation.net:%h:%p,proxyport=8079"

... but it should work just the same. For as long as this SSH connection remains open the RDP-server running on the LAN host "192.168.1.39" becomes available as "localhost:3389" ... so you RDP into your LAN, you open your web browser at home, you can surf away as you want ... And your browsing history stays at home and unless you somehow activated some cloud-sync feature (... why oh why would you?) it should never ever end up on your work machine.

Feel free to expand the number of ports (e.g. 5901 for VNC in addition to 3389 for RDP?).

File-transfer protocols such as SFTP or "rsync" of course work too ... In case you downloaded something and need it transferred:

sftp -P2243 -o "ProxyCommand=nc -X connect -x clientproxy.corporation.net:8079 %h %p" myuser@myhost.athome.ddns-domain.nu

rsync -av --progress -e ssh -p 2243 -o "ProxyCommand=nc -X connect -x clientproxy.corporation.net:8079 %h %p" 2>/dev/null myuser@myhost.athome.ddns-domain.nu:/path/to/remote/source/fileorfolder /local/path/to/destination/folder

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Disclaimer: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

In my experience in most places where they catch you doing this at work and without permission, they fire + sue you.

Again: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

First red flag your company is a joke: you have a local admin account.

Seriously, do not circumvent your corporate security. You have literally zero defense to these actions and can be terminated immediately. Not if, but when it happens, you will also likely be blamed for any issues which arise even if they are not directly your fault. If you did have permission somehow to do this, I am not sure why you are asking for help on how to do this. If your company does allow this, it's even more of a joke than allowing a local admin account and that raises other questions.

I allow my folks to BYOD on a (mostly) unrestricted BYOD/Guest network. Nobody has local admin accounts for any devices on the corp side. People can bring their personal laptops in and browse whatever and use VPNs on this network if they choose. There are some obvious restrictions (nothing illegal, for example), but if folks want to VPN to their self hosted environments or play on tiktok with their stuff, it's better for liability, better for security/compliance, and most importantly .. It is completely isolated from any corporate stuff. There is no need for circumventing when better options are available, promoting best practices for all employees.

Trouble is many IT departments blindly purchase install whatever crap a security company recommends, without following step 2 (white listing).

I’ve been blocked by these stupid filters from Amazon while in engineering having to order parts to get the equipment running because it was flagged as “Japanese porn” on the guest (contractor) network. And yes I resorted to a proxy/socks tunnel to my VPS.

Stop trying to bypass their security. It exists for a reason and bypassing it is typically a fireable offense.

Make nice with the IT guys and they might allow an exception, but try to circumvent them and you are bound to be more restricted, possibly losing local admin.

OP... as an admin... you are the worst.... but since you're not my user 🤣 you'll probably have better luck tunnelling out on 53 masquerading as DNS with something like iodine.

Btw, If I caught you doing this, because I block outbound DNS, I'd try to get you fired.

You wont like to hear this but: Dont do this. Do not try to circumvent protections that company IT has put in place. You will find yourself in a meeting with IT and HR much quicker than you think.

You have 3 options:

• Stop doing what youre trying to do

• Talk to IT and see if they would make exceptions for you

• Keep attempting this and risk losing your job

You might want to bookmark a sub like /r/LegalAdvice for the future, good luck! /r/SysAdmin and /r/CyberSecurityAdvice can probably also tell you to stop doing this.

When I was working in companies with very restrictive firewalls and needed to access my homeserver via SSH, I was using TOR browser (which exists as portable versions so you need to install anything which you are not allowed to). TOR Browser creates a socks proxy, which you can then use from kitty/putty ssh (which also have portable versions) to dial out.