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Date:      Wed, 29 Mar 2000 13:33:24 +1000 (EST)
From:      Enno Davids <nconedd@peppermint.national.com.au>
To:        danny@FreeBSD.ORG (Daniel O'Callaghan)
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: DoS attacks
Message-ID:  <200003290333.NAA29456@peppermint.national.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10003291232030.24830-100000@enya.clari.net.au> from Daniel O'Callaghan at "Mar 29, 0 12:41:22 pm"

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|earlier Danny wrote:
| 
| Does anyone know a URL for technical info on the recent DoS on Yahoo! etc.
| The reports I've found all refer to "floods of packets", but don't say
| whether they were TCP SYN or SYN/ACK or what.

There are various analyses of these attacks around. The tools have split
into three development streams (like all the best open source projects do!)
under the names stacheldraht, trinoo and tfn.

For some discussion and a comprehensive set of links have a look at:

	http://securityportal.com/direct.cgi?/research/ddosfaq.html
	http://securityportal.com/ddos/

| GlobalCenter, who look after the Yahoo! facilities managed to do something
| to quell the attack, but it took them a few hours. Anyone know what they
| did?  I use GlobalCenter Melbourne, myself, so I'll ask the techs there if
| they can find out, too.

Generally the thing that distinguishes these attacks is that they don't need
to moderate load on the attacking systems given that they use so many
(usually compromised) systems to mount the attacks. Hence the attacks tend
to eschew easily filtered things like large pings and SYN attacks in favour
of things that look like real traffic.

The challenge then is to identify DoS traffic and filter it as close to the
source as possible. Because the attacks tend to originate at lots of systems
distributed around the net, simple filtering will not work to stop them.

| Can anyone share the steps they have taken to limit the effect of these
| attacks on their own facilities.

There's not a lot you _can_ do. Essentially it looks like real traffic, can
pound on any legitimate service you expose and simply overwhelms your capacity
to respond. In fact, it can in extremis even hit services you don't expose
and simply use up all your bandwidth in packets which bounce off your packet
filter/firewall.

The real fix is for everyone to make sure their sites are secure. These
attacks are all built on compromising other people's systems as platforms
to launch the attack on third parties. The victim is attacked by systems
which have themselves been hijacked to that purpose and hence the real fix
is to prevent the hijacking to begin with.


Enno.




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