On the back of other 'security' posts....

Sun Aug 31 00:12:15 UTC 2003

Jack Bates wrote:

> Owen DeLong wrote:
>  Again, I just don't see where an ISP can or should be held liable for
>
>> forwarding what appears to be a correctly formatted datagram with a 
>> valid
>> destination address.  This is the desired behavior and without it, the
>> internet stops working.  The problem is systems with consistent and
>> persistent vulnerabilities.  One software company is responsible for
>> most of these, and, that would be the best place to concentrate any
>> litigation aimed at fixing the problem through liquidated damages.
>
>
> Most dDOS's come from bots. Bots are installed on all operating 
> systems and all architectures. I'd be surprised if the packets are all 
> spoofed. In most dDOS cases these days, they are real IP's and just a 
> high number of bots.

 From the traffic I've seen there are alot of bots - possibly a couple 
of 1000, however there are 2 distinct traffic types - spoofed and non 
spoofed.

The non spoofed is a pain, but easy to stop.  I have been phoning ISPs 
NOCs getting them shutdown one by one.

The spoofed is the problem and when we are seeing 300k SYN pps coming 
from addresses 0.0.0.4 through 40.0.0.0 in .4 increments I think the 
traffic is spoofed rather than there being 10's of thousands of machines 
(especially from hosts like 0.0.0.4!)

> The person responsible is the bot maintainer. Finding the controller 
> medium (probably irc) is the hard part, but once done, monitoring who 
> controls the bots isn't near as hard. Tracking them down can be abit 
> of fun, but usually they get lazy about covering tracks at that point. 
> A few media enriched prison sentences would be good.

Granted, however if we could get rid of most of the spoof attacks it 
would be a damn site easier to track them - I can tell you that the 
source is coming vi the SprintLink -
 Telecom NZ international link - however I cannot find out more on the 
other side of the pond without speaking to Sprint and I know noone there.

Yours

Mat