This is, as many things are, a huge problem in communication. Sony tells ISP 'Hey, you have customers abusing us. Fix it!'. ISP says 'Oh crap, sorry, what's going on? We'll run it down.' Sony says nothing. Let's just stop here for a second. This is fundamentally no different then the 'I have a problem, it's the network! complaints we've all dealt with forever. You spend days/weeks/months working on it. Maybe you ultimately find a goofy switchport, or maybe you discover that the server HDDs were crapping the bed and the problem server was chugging because of that. But you had to spend tons of time working on it because you couldn't get the info you need because the reporter was CONVINCED they KNEW what it was. Why should Simon have to spend hours of engineering time fishing through traffic captures and logs when he doesn't even know what he's LOOKING for? What does PSN consider 'abuse' here? Does Simon have customers infected with botnets that are targeting PSN at times? Or does PSN assume nobody will ever have more than a couple Playstations in a house, so if they see more than N connections to PSN from the same IP, it's malicious, since CGN is likely not something they considered? ( If anyone wants to place beer wagers, I'm picking the later. ) I spend about 8 weeks this year going back and forth with a Very Large Website Network who had blocked a /17 of IP space from accessing ANY of their sites because of 'malicious traffic' from a specific /23. 5 of those weeks, their responses consisted of 'it's malicious, you go find it, should be obvious', 'you clearly don't know what you're doing, we're wasting our time', etc. Week 5, I was able to extract that it was a specific web crawler that they said was knocking their databases over. After a conversation with their CIO the following week, they came back and admitted that a junior system admin made some PHP changes on a bunch of servers that he didn't think was in production,and when we crawled THOSE servers, Bad Things Happened for them. We were doing nothing wrong ; they just refused to look, and found it easier to blame us. Simon's getting screwed because he's not being given any information to try and solve the problem, and because his customers are likely blaming him because he's their ISP. Sony needs to stand up and work with him here. On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 8:30 AM, Tom Smyth <tom.smyth@wirelessconnect.eu> wrote:
Hi Simon,
as other responders have said it is an inherent issue with NAT in general, on workaround is to limit the ratio of actual users to an external IPv4 address, the other thing we have seen from our Abuse contact emails from PSN, is that malicious activity towards the PSN is often accompanied by other malicious activities such as SSH brute force outbound and spaming...
I would suggest that
1) limit the ratio of users to an external ipv4 address as much as possible (which would reduce the impact of one compromised customer bringing down play time for other clients behind the same nat
2)do some "canary in the mine" monitoring for obviously malicious traffic (loads of SMTP traffic outbound) and lots of connection requests to SSH servers ... if you see that traffic from behind your CGNAT device .. just temporarily block the internal ip of the user until they clean up their devices.
this is the pain with NAT you have to do extra work in order prevent infected users interrupting internet connectivity for other innocent users... I think you can use simple firewall rules on your edge router to identify multiple connections to SMTP and SSH in a short period of time..
If you do the minimum to detect that abuse then you cant be accused of invading peoples privacy... (bear in mind obvious false positives) (Monitoring systems etc) ...
Hope this helps,
On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 2:12 PM, Simon Lockhart <simon@slimey.org> wrote:
All,
We operate an access network with several hundred thousand users. Increasingly we're putting the users behind CGNAT in order to continue to give them an IPv4 service (we're all dual-stack, so they all get public IPv6 too). Due to the demographic of our users, many of them are gamers.
We're hitting a problem with PlayStationNetwork 'randomly' blocking some of our CGNAT outside addresses, because they claim to have received anomalous, or 'attack' traffic from that IP. This obviously causes problems for the other legitimate users who end up behind the same public IPv4 address.
Despite numerous attempts to engage with PSN, they are unwilling to give us any additional information which would allow us to identify the 'rogue' users on our network, or to identify the 'unwanted' traffic so that we could either block it, or use it to identify the rogue users ourselves.
Has anyone else come up against the problem, and/or have any suggestions on how best to resolve it?
Many thanks in advance,
Simon
-- Kindest regards, Tom Smyth
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