Oh yes!  Good lord I about went insane with this.  I was working with a 
customer single homed to cBeyond.  I spent 3 hours on the phone with cBeyond to 
figure out what was going on, it looks like a broken route.  Come to find out 
it was an XO "security null".  The engineer on the phone from cBeyond said to 
me "Well, I have learned 2 things today.  1, XO nulls for 'security purposes' 
at random.  2, I am no longer shocked by any ridiculous policy I will ever come 
across again."

In this case majority traffic was going from cBeyond to anywhere (via XO) and 
being eaten, however it was VERY tough to diagnose as all parties involved 
assumed this would not be occurring between source and destination without good 
public documentation or at least any record of this happening to someone else.  
Also I guess we all assumed that major bandwidth players don't filter anything.

I personally think its good on paper, but very bad real life until there is a 
way to notify the end customer of the violation quickly.  This issue literally 
took 3 full weeks to figure out what was going on.  Yes this works great in a 
colo datacenter as you have the customer contact info (hopefully).  But in the 
case where my customers provider was having the IP filtered by their transit it 
was hell to diagnose.  In my case the customer had a single infected machine 
that was making outbound connections on TCP3389 in the range of about 100 
connections every 5 minutes and because of this was entirely being "security 
nulled".

Blake

-----Original Message-----
From: clay...@haydel.org [mailto:clay...@haydel.org] 
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 7:43 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: XO blocking individual IP's


I'm hoping someone has had the same experiences, and is further toward a 
resolution on this than I am. About 6 months ago, we noticed that XO was 
blackholing one specific IP out of a /24.  Traces to that IP stopped on XO's 
network, traces to anything else out of the block went through fine.
XO finally admitted that they had a new security system that identifies 
suspicious traffic and automatically blocks the IP for 30 minutes.  We had to 
get the IP in question "whitelisted" by their security guys.  The traffic was 
all legit, it was just on a high port # that they considered suspicious.

There have several more cases like this, and XO has not been forthcoming with 
information. We're either looking to be exempted from this filtering or at 
least get a detailed description of how the system works.  I'm not sure how 
they think this is acceptable from a major transit provider.
Anybody else had similar problems?


Clayton Haydel



Reply via email to