On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 08:24:16AM -0800, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
if you automate abuse reporting you can basically assume that the reciver will automate abuse handling. since that has in fact happened as far as i can tell the probably of you automated asbuse replaies ever reaching a human who cares or can do something about it is effecetivly zero.
It's difficult to sort out legitimate complaints for port scanning. Consider that the vast majority of such complaints a provider receieves, particularly automated ones (groan), are just flat out wrong or stupid (or both). For example: "Your web server is hacking my web browser on port 80", or "Why are you probing me with UDP packets on port 53 from this host named NS1...", but usually stated with far more capital letters, misspellings, profanity, and threats to sue or report your web server to the authorities because it dared to respond to their port 80 connection. :) Things only seem to get worse when you actually try to have a halfass team of people respond to these. Usually the victim is someone who gets a syn flood from random sourced addresses, correctly responds with RSTs, and ends up being accused of port scanning due to the backscatter hitting some random military IP address. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience should be able to look at any of the detailed packet logs and clearly see the very obvious patterns which indicate the differences between legitimate port scans, backscatter, or classic spoofed source syn floods. But they never do, even when they claim to be highly experienced and in positions of power. For many providers, getting a threatening e-mail from a government agency will result in someone being turned off, even if they have done nothing wrong. Recently I saw someone running an online gaming service who experienced this in the other direction. The attacker set his IP as the source, and directly fired off millions of packets to random destinations. Not only was their a direct DoS effect due to all the RST coming in, but over the course of 48 hours he received THOUSANDS of angry calls, many complaints to his provider, and even several death threats. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)