HTTP DDoS attack on our servers

From: Markus Peter (warpat_private)
Date: Tue Jul 08 2003 - 06:06:32 PDT

  • Next message: James C. Slora, Jr.: "RE: Administrivia..."

    Hello
    
    Since yesterday, about 8pm CET, we observe a strange phenomenon on one of 
    our servers, which appears like a DDoS attack. The characteristics do not 
    match those of the typical known UDP DDoS tools but is TCP based.
    
    Basically, > 8.000 IP numbers are sending HTTP requests to our server on a 
    non-HTTP port (8000), which ran an entirely different, not HTTP related 
    service on this machine. The IP numbers are mostly assigned to Europe and 
    North America.
    
    The requests always look the same way:
    
    GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1
    Accept: */*
    User-Agent: UserAgent
    Connection: close
    Host: <our ip number>
    
    Please note that they literally supplied "UserAgent" as User-Agent - I only 
    removed our ip number from the requests. Each attacking host opens multiple 
    connections per second. Even though the server which ran at 8000 could not 
    handle HTTP requests at all and immediately closed the connection after the 
    first sent line, the sheer number of connection attempts was enough to 
    basically force us to put the service offline, as we had over 60.000 
    concurrent TCP connections due to this.
    
    Due to the above described characteristics, I'm pretty sure that it's not 
    just a misguided link on some large website, but some sort of non-browser 
    program doing the requests.
    
    We nmapped some of the requesting machines. All of the scanned hosts appear 
    to be running windows, with all of them having TCP port 45836 open. If we 
    try connecting to that port, the connection is either immediately closed 
    again by the remote end, or occasionally kept open indefinitely, but in 
    neither case any data is sent back to us.
    
    I'm now completely puzzled on what is happening and what kind of tool we 
    confront. Anyone else experiences incidents like those?
    
    -- 
    Markus Peter - SPiN AG
    warpat_private
    
    
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Attend the Black Hat Briefings & Training, July 28 - 31 in Las Vegas, the 
    world's premier technical IT security event! 10 tracks, 15 training sessions, 
    1,800 delegates from 30 nations including all of the top experts, from CSO's to 
    "underground" security specialists.  See for yourself what the buzz is about!  
    Early-bird registration ends July 3.  This event will sell out. www.blackhat.com
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Jul 09 2003 - 12:00:50 PDT