RE: IPS vs Firewall

[Steven Trewick <STrewick () joplings co uk>]

Might I suggest using the witty worm as an example ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/07/witty_evil_firsts/

The CAIDA analysis linked by the above story is well worth a 
look.

In case you have been holidaying in tibet, or a cave, the 
witty worm was a recent UDP borne worm that specifically targeted
ISS firewall appliances and software (both corporate and 
personal).

When it hit a vulnerable system, it spammed 20k copies of
itself to random IP addresses and then dumped 64k of random
data to a random area on the hard disk of the host machine,
then it repeated this cycle until the host crashed.

Now admitedly, this is most likey a 'fail closed' scenario, 
but it illustrates the point that firewalls are open to 
attack.

A long list of cisco router/firewall security related things
can be found here http://snipurl.com/608w  (securityfocus search)

Not to mention the recent kerfuffle about aincent and
fairly well known TCP RST DoS vulns, some links to which can be 
found here :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/21/tcp_vuln/


HTH ;-)



> List,
>
> I am to give a presentation concerning IPS vs. IDS and why we 
> have decided 
> to implement an IPS solution.  I have stuff about each of 
> those, but my big 
> problem is going to come from my LAN/WAN group.  Because I've 
> decided to 
> place the IPS outside the firewall, they have already moaned 
> about it and I 
> know they're going to bring up why we need IPS vs. Firewall.  
> I have stuff 
> about what firewalls don't look for or do compared to IPS.
>
> My question is, how would you go about showing that firewalls 
> or BigIP 
> routers can be attacked directly?  For those of you 
> concidering IPS, can you 
> impart any of the knowledge gained by implementing your solutions?
>
> Many thanks,
> Benny




 


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