Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: CodeGreen beta release (idq-patcher/antiCodeRed/etc.)


From: "Stanley G. Bubrouski" <stan () ccs neu edu>
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 20:32:30 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Emre Yildirim wrote:

Kev wrote:


Unfortunately, all the world's not the USA (much to the chagrin of many
of my fellow citizens, it seems).  Also, there are many, many, many
clueless admins out there; anybody that has to deal with script kiddies
knows just how often Korean (for instance) hosts are broken into and used
for all sorts of nefarious purposes.  90% of the time, I'm unable to even
report spam to the open relays in that country, because not only is
postmaster@ not even present, the contacts listed in whois.nic.or.kr just
point into never-never land.  I fear we will never see the end of this
particular problem :/


I know what you mean.  I had to deal with lots of attacks & probes from 
*ac.kr myself.  I think a long time ago there was a discussion on 
incidents@ (I think, I'm not sure) suggesting to create router ACL's 
with korean/offending IP numbers to block them completely from the 
Internet (similar to e-mail anti-spam lists).  But then again, that 
defeats the purpose of the internet (to communicate around the world). 
As long as admins aren't educated and made aware of these problems, it's 
not going to change at all.  But I'm not completely sure if infecting 
systems with a counter-worm is the solution either.  Like some people 
already pointed out, it does consume lots of bandwidth, sets off IDSs, 
and irritates people who have Apache servers, whose logs get clogged up 
by these obsolete requests.  Code Red is going to die out sometime 
eventually, just like Melissa did...so I'm not worried about it much.

It may sound unreasonable but using access-lists on routers on routers is
great way for companies and providers to stop the spread of Code Red.  By
blockign all traffic from a person's machine they are then forced to call
their provider's tech support to report they lost their connection.  The
provider then can inform the customer they are infected, explain to them
they must patch their system, remove them from the ACLs, wait 24 hours and
if they show signs they are patched then do not reapply the ACL.  Anotehr
way is to turn on router and firewall logging and use ACLs to log http
traffic and filter out Code Red infected users and call them and e-mail
them the patches.  This doesn't block the user from accessing the network
like the first method does, but it also doesn't prevent the infected user
from infecting more people on the net and congesting the network.

Regards,

Stan

--
Stan Bubrouski                                       stan () ccs neu edu
23 Westmoreland Road, Hingham, MA 02043        Cell:   (617) 835-3284





Cheers

-- 
Emre Yildirim <emre () asper org>
GPG KeyID 0xF9E4A1D1 (keyserver.pgp.com)



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