RE: RE: Socket Accept() error occurred in QHTTP (classicserver)

Scott,

What it looks like is that someone from a specific IP address, was going
through our RPG Community Forum messages, one by one, and following those
links to the individual replies and hunting for email addresses. 
So I've done two things. (1) I removed the function/page that allows users
of the forum to specify their email address and therefore the link to the
page that would allow sending directly to those email address. And (2) I've
blocked that IP address. Although I'm sure tomorrow a new one will be used. 
Thanks for the tips.

-Bob Cozzi
www.RPGxTools.com
RPG xTools - Enjoy programming again.


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 2:23 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] RE: Socket Accept() error occurred in QHTTP
(classicserver)


> Is it really though Bob?  If I look at my logs that is the period of time
> when I get most DOS and other similar hack attacks.  Is it possible that
> some attempt at a buffer over-run exploit or something is triggering it?

Sounds more like a SYN flood than a buffer overrun!

To establish a TCP connection, a client computer sends a SYN (Synchronize) 
packet to the server. This tells the server that a new connection is 
coming, so it sends back a SYN/ACK (Synch Acknowledge) packet and the 
accept() API creates a new socket descriptor for the connection.

A SYN flood is where someone writes a program that generates lots of SYN 
packets from fake IP addresses and sends them as fast as possible to a 
server.  This causes the server to think that lots of simultaneous 
connection attempts are coming in, and it'll open up descriptors and send 
back SYN/ACK packets.

Eventually, they time out and the descriptors close, but if you send the 
SYN packets fast enough, the server won't be able to recover and will run 
out of descriptors.  That's what the "Too many files open" message means 
-- that you've run out of descriptors.

IBM could fix the problem by modifying the TCP/IP stack to be more careful 
in uses as few resources as possible until the complete session is set up, 
or they could drop SYN packets when they come in faster than a certain 
rate, there's lots of different strategies.

More info on SYN flooding can be found here:
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1996-21.html

I don't know for sure that this is what's happening, it's just a guess on 
my part.