[Esd-l] badtrans ad infinitum

John D. Hardin jhardin at impsec.org
Wed Nov 28 11:12:01 PST 2001


On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Christian Parigger wrote:

> just the way things seem to be in life. I fully appreciate your
> upgrades, yet certainly I am/ we are not 'infinitely' save.

No, the sanitizer is only one part of a multilayered defense system.
You still need firewalling, and antivirus, and so forth.

> One idea would include the use of portsentry-alike protection for
> flodding from certain sites, although I am not certain how to do
> that with email, viz. if more than so-many "active emails" come
> from a site per hour or day, block the site (I'd know how to that
> with attacks on ports to a reasonable degree).

I don't know that it would be useful for worms. A worm storm is more
along the lines of a DDoS attack - you're being nibbled to death by
ducks, rather than having one site flooding you.

> I/we have been flodded with Sircam back in July, whereby
> "overfloweth" resulted in my/our quarantine. Therefore, the milder
> solution would perhaps be to blackhole (or bit-bucket into
> /dev/null) active email received at a set rate from certain sites
> (rather than blocking the whole site).

Okay, that may be possible at a lighter weight than sanitizing each
message.

How do you define "active email" ?

--
 John Hardin KA7OHZ    ICQ#15735746    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
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