Re: Denial of service

[Frank de Jong <frankdj () PH TN TUDelft NL>]

> Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 15:44:12 -0700
> From: "Tupshin Harper" <tupshin () tupshin com>
> Subject: RE: Denial of service
>
> There are generally three reasons for an attack:
> 1) Attacker wants to obtain information.
> 2) Attacker wants to obtain use of resources
> 3) Attacker wants to inflict damage on the attacked
> 4) Attacker wants to climb Mt. Everest(because it's there).
>
> Number three is frequently overlooked by those that should know better.
> Many otherwise secure networks/systems are susceptible to denial of service
> attacks, typically motivated by number three.  Examples of denial of service
> attacks range from crashing a server to using a thermo-nuclear device on
> your ISP.

There are also ways to combine some of these 'three' reasons.
Suppose I have a server host that offers a certain sensitive service
to a network, and I would like to take over this service. If some
client hosts are 'loosely' configured (so that they accept this
service from other servers if the main server fails), I could
DoS-flood the original server, causing it to refuse new connections,
and take over the main server roll.

For services like NIS and NFS, I could create bogus deamons that
collect passwords or give tampered versions of /bin/su, login, or
utilities that are frequently run as user 'root'.

Frank