Security Guideance

Tue Feb 23 20:19:56 UTC 2010

Quick suggestion BUT you may want to have Parallels look into it if
you can't seem to find it since you pay for the support anyways.  You
may also want to check to see if it is a cron job that is doing it (if
the machine was root kitted, you may have accidentally copied a cron
job over.  Another suggestion would be simply move half the accounts
to one server and half to another and see if it ddoses again and keep
doing that until you find the problem account.

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Paul Stewart <pstewart at nexicomgroup.net> wrote:
> Hi folks...
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> We have a strange series of events going on in the past while.... Brief
> history here, looking for input from the community - especially some of
> the security folks on here.
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> We provide web hosting services - one of our hosting boxes was found a
> while back with root kits installed, un patched software and lots of
> other "goodies".    With some staff changes in place (don't think I need
> to elaborate on that) we are trying to clean up several issues including
> this particular server.  A new server was provisioned, patched, and
> deployed.  User data was moved over and now the same issue is coming
> back....
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> The problem is that a user on this box appears to be launching high
> traffic DOS attacks from it towards other sites.  These are UDP based
> floods that move around from time to time - most of these attacks only
> last a few minutes.
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> I've done tcpdumps within seconds of the attack starting and to date
> been unable to find the source of this attack (we know the server, just
> not sure which customer it is on the server that's been compromised).
> Several hours of scanning for php, cgi, pl type files have been wasted
> and come up nowhere...
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> It's been suggested to dump IDS in front of this box and I know I'll get
> some feedback positive and negative in that aspect.
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> What tools/practices do others use to resolve this issue?  It's  a
> Centos 5.4 box running latest Plesk control panel.
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> Typically we have found it easy to track down the offending script or
> program - this time hasn't been easy at all...
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> Thanks,
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> Paul
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