Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 02:47:00 +0100 From: "Johnathan Meehan" <jmeehan@easynet.co.uk> To: "Ed Gold" <edgold@mindspring.com>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Regarding DOS violations Message-ID: <006101bf7368$bd1dc0e0$030000ac@scully> References: <38A209BE.738ED208@mindspring.com>
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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 <edgold@mindspring.com> To: <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> 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 > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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