can you explain how you went about fixing this nephyrin or provide more
details?

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Nephyrin Zey <[email protected]> wrote:

> The bandwidth involved in this attack is tiny. The issue is srcds chokes
> on large numbers of A2S_INFO packets, its not the traffic that's doing
> machines in. I'd reckon a single residential connection could take down
> a server this way. Once you fix the srcds issue, the problem stops. I
> have a daemon that intercepts server queries and handles them itself.
> It's currently handling this attacker hammering on two servers without
> breaking 1% CPU or making a single-pixel dent in my bandwidth graphs,
> and my tf2 servers continue to run just fine.
>
> And if you actually examine the attack, it's very obviously a single
> source with spoofed IPs. I rather doubt someone has a million-strong
> botnet containing nearly 30% unallocated IP ranges, that all happen to
> have the same exact path length.
>
> - Neph
>
> On 09/05/2009 12:50 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> > This... actually isn't a bad idea.  It's a pain to implement, though, for
> a
> > couple of reasons.
> >
> > First, the assumption by most on this thread is that it's a single guy
> > operating from a single (or just a handful) of computers.  They further
> > assume that he's forging the source IP addresses so the requests look
> like
> > they're coming from many many different machines.  If this is true,
> there's
> > no way to trace or block him based upon the information included in the
> > packets he's creating.  I think this assumption is wrong, as I'll explain
> > below.
> >
> > Second, if this assumption is incorrect you need to find a way to
> identify
> > each and every source and block them one at a time.  Netblocks are at
> best a
> > crude measure which risks blocking many legitimate clients.  Such a
> process
> > needs to be automated as much as possible or it's not effective.
> >
> > Now, why do I think that this is probably not coming from just a handful
> of
> > sources?  Simple.  DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service, after
> > all.  Botnets are reaching incredible proportions.  It's easy to rent as
> > many as a quarter million compromised machines if you want to and you
> have
> > the cash.
> >
> > Too cheap or too poor to rent someone else's network of infected PCs?  No
> > problem.  Tools exist to build new malware and they're easy to come by if
> > you're willing to start looking in the right places.  All you have to do
> is
> > build your bot code and figure out a way to get it loaded on 5,000,
> 10,000,
> > or more PCs.  After that, DDoS to your heart's content.  Script kiddies
> do
> > this _all_ _the_ _time_.
> >
> > So, when under attack your choices are:
> >
> > *  Wait it out.
> >
> > *  Work with your vendor to figure out a way block the attack in the
> first
> > place.  (Valve, obviously, in this case.)
> >
> > *  Automate the process of identifying sources and filtering them out.
> >
> > *  Cry a lot.
> >
> > Generally, I settle for a combination of the first and second options.
>  If
> > an attack gets bad enough, I work with my local ISP to implement the
> third.
> > (My server is co-located in their datacenter and they're really good guys
> to
> > work with.)  Generally, some combination of tcpwrapper, netfilter, and
> > iptables will do the job on my Linux server.  Sometimes we find it easier
> to
> > just block it at one of their routers so they don't have to deal with the
> > traffic on their network.
> >
> > Every now and again, I find myself following the fourth option until I
> > figure out what's going on and fall back on some combination of the first
> > three options.  :-)
> >
> > HTH.
> >
> > =JpS=SgtRock
> >
>
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