Hi Ed,
Your second point, on the logging is interesting. It would certainly be
worth collecting a central repository of IP addresses relating to the
machines used to propogate the attacks.
The point to remember is that they are victims too, but obviously despite
the wide publicity about these activities they have not bothered to take any
action to protect themselves therefore hurting everybody else. This problem
is becoming too common to allow chances to organisations that even as of yet
have taken no corrective action. Perhaps what is really needed is the
ability to remove the connection of these servers from the 'net backbone,
refusing to reconnect them until they had corrected the problem. But I don't
see how that is going to happen.
Maybe, rather like ISPs and spammers (or AOL), your logging idea could be
used as a first step - given the provided information in a repository,
individual organisations could take the option to refuse to accept packets
originating from these servers straight away. The owners could /then/ be
contacted and informed, to be removed from the list after correcting the
problem. If this were a feature, the list would grow quickly enough to at
least make the lives of the perpatrators rather more difficult, and the life
of the list administrator rather busy.
Some tools to automate things as much as possible, and your away, Ed. I
don't see why this couldn't be started by, but by no means limited to,
FreeBSD users. Then again, perhaps this is too political a move to make?
Johnathan Meehan
- Original Message -
From: Ed Gold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2000 1:43 AM
Subject: Regarding DOS violations
After reading the article,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/09
/MN23532.DTL
I am wondering if FreeBSD should take any action to protect our users.
I think it would speak incredibly highly of FreeBSD if Yahoo and other
"customers" were to have some kind of protection from such an attack. My
initial thoughts are:
A web server should know its limitations and not attempt to handle more
requests than it can manage. It should invoke a service cutoff of any
and all users that cause excessive loading over a measured interval of
time. Essentially, the machine would have to track all requests, rank
them as to how much effort/resources they require, and then
"integrate" this data over a fixed time period. If the overall load is
higher than an acceptable threshold, the most offensive clients get
"ignored" for a fixed period of time. This will, no doubt, ignore a
small number of legitimate users; however, that's far better than not
serving anyone.
Additionally, the server could log this activity which would make it
possible to contact the owners/operators of these most offensive
systems. With any luck, this could help them realize that their sites
are being hacked into and they could take corrective action to prevent
future attacks. If we let them know that FreeBSD identified their
problem, it might even be an excellent marketing move for us. Comments
Anyone?
Regards,
Ed
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