nanog mailing list archives

Re: SNMP DDoS: the vulnerability you might not know you have


From: Enno Rey <erey () ernw de>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:15:12 +0200

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 03:17:37PM +0000, Thomas St-Pierre wrote:
The problem isn't the people on this list leaving the public snmp
community on their devices, it's the vendors of home routers leaving it
there in their devices. Normal end users don't know or even care what snmp
is. (nor can we expect them too)

A simple scan of a large cable/dsl ISP's address space will likely net you
tens of thousands of devices which respond to the "public" snmp community.

I can confirm this.
we did some enumeration (and discussed the said amplification attack) here:
http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2007dubai/materials/D1%20-%20Enno%20Rey%20-%20Digging%20into%20SNMP%202007%20-%20An%20Excercise%20on%20Breaking%20Networks.pdf

at the time once you scanned "typical broadband segments" of major European carriers, pretty much every address 
responding to a ping had SNMP "public" also. 

we gave the talk several times and demoed the amplification attack (with a slightly modified version of this tool: 
https://www.ernw.de/download/snmpattack.pl) against some of our systems, abusing $SOME_RANDOM_SEGMENT as amplifiers (we 
asked to stop [camera] recording in those cases where the talks were recorded) and it worked pretty much all the time 
(~20:1 ratio, initiated from the respective conferences' hotel wifi).

thanks

Enno





Thomas



On 13-07-31 10:57 AM, "Blake Dunlap" <ikiris () gmail com> wrote:

This looks like more a security issue with the devices, not border
security
issues.

If you're seeing replies of that size, it means the devices themselves are
set up to allow public queries of their information (not secured by even
keys), which no one should be comfortable with. People should never be
leaving the public access snmp strings on devices even if they are
internal. Edge blocking just masks the real issue.


-Blake


On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:25 PM, bottiger <bottiger10 () gmail com> wrote:

Before you skim past this email because you already read the Prolexic
report on it or some other article on the internet, there are 2
disturbing properties that I haven't found anywhere else online.

1) After sending abuse emails to many networks, we received many angry
replies that they monitored their traffic for days without seeing
anything (even as we were being attacked) and that their IPs were
spoofed and would block us for spamming them.

What we discovered was that their firewalls/routers/gateways coming
from vendors like Cisco and SonicWall apparently didn't record SNMP
traffic going in or out of themselves. We confirmed this multiple
times by running a query to an IP that was claimed to be clean and
watching the response come 10-60 seconds later because the device was
being so heavily abused.

2) SNMP reflection offers the largest amplification factor by far,
even surpassing DNS, Chargen, or NTP by a wide margin. I have tested a
68 byte query and received responses of up to 30,000 to 60,000 bytes.
The trick is to use GetBulkRequest to start enumerating from the first
OID and setting max repetitions to a large number. This is contrary to
the other articles online which suggest a much smaller amplification
factor with other queries.

This protocol is also prevalent in many devices ranging from routers
to printers.

To solve this problem you should block SNMP traffic coming from
outside your network and whitelist outside IPs that require it.





-- 
Enno Rey

ERNW GmbH - Carl-Bosch-Str. 4 - 69115 Heidelberg - www.ernw.de
Tel. +49 6221 480390 - Fax 6221 419008 - Cell +49 174 3082474

Handelsregister Mannheim: HRB 337135
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Enno Rey

Troopers 2013 Videos online: http://www.youtube.com/user/TROOPERScon?feature=watch

=======================================================
Blog: www.insinuator.net || Conference: www.troopers.de
=======================================================


Current thread: