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Date:      Tue, 15 Jun 1999 09:29:04 +0100
From:      FastNet Admin <netadmin@fastnet.co.uk>
To:        security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: New Attack via sendmail?
Message-ID:  <3.0.6.32.19990615092904.00943210@192.168.0.100>
In-Reply-To: <199906141930.VAA14403@office.omc.net>

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Hi,

At 21:30 14/06/99 +0200, Lutz Rabing wrote:
>
>I've seen some pretty strange lines in syslog of one of our webservers.
>
>The box is running 2.2.8 with sendmail 8.9.3 and has never been out of
>swap space before, in fact it's not using swap space at all under normal
>conditions.
>
I saw something like this and it appeared to be caused by a process called
procmail that was spawning across the system using huge amounts of memory
and processor capability. 

Though I never got totally to the bottom of this it appeared as if stupidly
large emails being delivered locally invoked procmail. Procmail then
swallowed all the resources till the system eventually crashed with out of
swap errors. This happened several times. 

It appears as if a log file being mailed to a user account was the cause of
the problem and I have stopped this routine from happening. If I get the
same thing again I'll set an email size limit of something like 30MB.

Regards


Ian Robertson
FastNet International Ltd



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