New Denial of Service Attack on Panix

Mon Sep 16 23:14:14 UTC 1996

Dear NANOG/IEPG Folks;

As you should know by now from reading the papers, Panix, the first ISP in
NYC, has come under a new denial of service attack. The Wall Street Journal
quoted Bill Cheswick to the effect that the attack is "unstoppable". Almost,
but not quite, true.

It's true that there isn't anything that Panix can do on its own to stop
this attack. It's true that it would be hard to verify source addresses at
MAEs and NAPs. But we could all verify source addresses at the first hop
entry points. And get default route and unauthorized transit protection to boot.

I'd like to know what the community thinks can be done to deal with an
escalation of these attacks should this occur. Are you doing any source
address verification now? Are you doing anything to help Panix? Could you?

How seriously do you take this threat? If Panix were to go out of business
and Bob Metcalfe wrote a column on it, (  :-) do you think we would have to
deal with it together then, or can we sit tight and expect it to blow over?
After all, it's easy to dump chemicals in the reservoir, but we still drink
the water, right?

Thanks.

--Kent

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Kent W. England                                     Six Sigma Networks
1655 Landquist Drive, Suite 100              Voice/Fax:   619.632.8400
Encinitas, CA  92024                                kwe at 6SigmaNets.com
Experienced Internet Consulting     ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~