Klarinet Archive - Posting 000890.txt from 1998/10

From: "Mark Charette" <charette@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Off-topic: Re: router under attack
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 16:43:28 -0400

Mark wrote:

>> The router at AGIS (our backbone Internet supplier) has been under a
>>concerted attack both yesterday and today.
>
>Just out of curiosity: what does this mean? Is this the work of
>internet pirates, intent on looting and plundering the web, or merely
>a batch of bits and bytes gone bad? I have visions of "Tron"-like
>good and bad programs facing off in a virtual battle of immense
>proportions...

You weren't the only one who asked, so I'll reprint a letter I wrote to
another subscriber. Techweenies - please excuse the simplifications!
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A router serves a number of different addresses, letting certain ones
pass through to different sites. Our company, mika.com, owns 2 class C
"chunks" of address - 206.250.250.<0-255> and 206.250.251.<0-255> - 512
address spaces.

The router that serves us at AGIS may handle hundreds of these chunks -
some bigger, some smaller - and makes sure that each "chunk owner" gets
the packets (electronic packages of data) destined for them, and
receives packets from the customers and routes them to the "outside"
(somewhere else on the Internet).

An owner of some of the addresses served by the router that sits at AGIS
had someone "attacking" them. It could be a person or another company.
They attack in various ways - flooding them with mail, sending packets
to machines or services, probing for weak spots in the security,
whatever -but all electronically. When this is done, and millions of
packets start flooding into the AGIS router destined for some customer,
the other customers attached to that router suffer - there's no time to
service the other customers since the router is busy trying to get the
millions of incoming packets routed to the victim.

Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers,
----
Mark Charette@-----.org
Webmaster, http://www.sneezy.org/clarinet
All-around good guy and devil-may-care flying fool.
"There can be no freedom without discipline." - Nadia Boulanger

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