Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 19:43:42 -0500 From: Ed Gold <edgold@mindspring.com> To: "hackers@FreeBSD.ORG" <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Regarding DOS violations Message-ID: <38A209BE.738ED208@mindspring.com>
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After reading the article, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/09/MN23532.DTL I am wondering if FreeBSD should take any action to protect our users. I think it would speak incredibly highly of FreeBSD if Yahoo and other "customers" were to have some kind of protection from such an attack. My initial thoughts are: A web server should know its limitations and not attempt to handle more requests than it can manage. It should invoke a service cutoff of any and all users that cause excessive loading over a measured interval of time. Essentially, the machine would have to track all requests, rank them as to how much effort/resources they require, and then "integrate" this data over a fixed time period. If the overall load is higher than an acceptable threshold, the most offensive clients get "ignored" for a fixed period of time. This will, no doubt, ignore a small number of legitimate users; however, that's far better than not serving anyone. Additionally, the server could log this activity which would make it possible to contact the owners/operators of these most offensive systems. With any luck, this could help them realize that their sites are being hacked into and they could take corrective action to prevent future attacks. If we let them know that FreeBSD identified their problem, it might even be an excellent marketing move for us. Comments Anyone? Regards, Ed To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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