network mystery

From: network-questionsat_private
Date: Tue Mar 26 2002 - 16:24:38 PST

  • Next message: Basil Hussain: "Excess SMTP traffic to non-mail host"

    
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    Here is the situation.  Over the weekend, some 
    strange packets started showing up on my LAN.  The 
    packets were captured by one of my IDS systems 
    which monitor outbound traffic.  Analyzation of the 4 
    packets over the weekend, revealed that 2 of them 
    were generated using eEye's Retina (at least the 
    payload of the packet is consistent with Retina), and 
    the other 2 packets were created by Solarwinds IP 
    Network Browser (again the payload of the packet 
    was consistent with that of this tool).  This is not what 
    is unusual.  What is unusual is that the source 
    address is a public address, located in various parts 
    of the world (The US, France, Belgium, etc), and not 
    one of our private space addresses.  The destination 
    address is always 192.168.1.70.  192.168.1.70 does 
    not exist on my network (we don't use this IP scheme 
    anywhere).  The reason why the outbound sensor 
    detected this is because the core router is setup to 
    forward all packets it doesn't have a route to, to the 
    firewall and ultimately the Internet.
    
    My network is a class B environment, but only a small 
    range of hosts are on the network, roughly 1000 
    devices (in the local LAN).  There are 2 other 
    gateways; one of which is a WAN connection to other 
    offices, and the other is a collection of various 
    vendors who need access to our internal LAN for 
    various reasons.  Most of the systems are running 
    W2K SP2, although there are various *nix systems 
    (AIX, Solaris, etc.) for various needs.  
    
    I have set up sniffers and sensors on the various 
    VLANs; including our WAN and vendor connections.  
    The traffic has happened several times on Monday 
    and Tuesday.  But of course not on the vlans that 
    were being monitored.  Most of the traffic is 
    generated between the hours of 2 am to 6:30 am, 
    and then again starting about 4:30pm until about 
    11pm.  However the times are not consistent, nor is 
    there a discernable pattern.  The volume of the traffic 
    is low.  However since the weekend, the number of 
    packets that have been recorded have increased, but 
    I should mention that the traffic to date over the past 4 
    days has been less than 30 packets.
    
    However, the traffic is different than what was 
    recorded over the weekend.  All the traffic over the 
    weekend was ICMP echo-requests.  There has only 
    been 1 ICMP packet since then, and it was a plain 
    vanilla ICMP packet with no payload (type 8).  All the 
    other traffic recorded is TCP, with only the SYN flag 
    set, and the payload is empty.  The traffic is destined 
    for port 80.  The source port is random, between 
    3000 and 4500. 
    
    I have checked everything I can think of, from 
    verifying the times of VPN sessions to having every 
    single hard drive in the entire network scanned 
    searching for either eEye or Solarwinds.  They are all 
    negative.  My current pursuit is find a way to grab the 
    MAC address.  At least if I have the MAC, and I can 
    check each VLAN's switch and trace the machine 
    back.  I am still working on this.  But, other than 
    having one of the sniffers locate which VLAN the 
    activity is coming from, I can think of no other choice 
    available to me.  
    
    Since I am posting this to incidents, I should state 
    that there is absolutely no sign of an intrusion, of 
    course, that doesn't mean much.  :)
    
    I have tried to speculate what tool could cause this.  
    Its a tool which spoofs its address (or at least 
    appears to), but always has the same destination.  
    So it would never expect a response to be returned to 
    it (assuming its spoofed).  It generates ICMP packets, 
    that are either standard vanilla packets, Solarwinds, 
    or Retina.  It generates TCP packets, to port 80 only, 
    but again, always to the same IP.  There are no 
    payloads (other than the first 4 packets captured over 
    the weekend).  And the destination address is a 
    private space address which is not used anywhere 
    on my network.  
    
    The only other thoughts I have is that perhaps this is 
    a malfunctioning file sharing tool (akin to Grokster, 
    KaZaA, etc.)  The time of day, would be consistent 
    with someone who comes into work early (and stops 
    downloading), and then resumes the downloads 
    when they leave for the day.  I can't confirm this yet, 
    nor can I explain how and/or why a file sharing tool 
    would act in this way.
    
    Can anyone please offer some insight?  Can you 
    think of anything else I can do?  Has anyone seen 
    activity like this before?  Any help, as always, is 
    greatly appreciated.
    
    -md
    
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