Attacks bringing my system down!

Justin Smith (jsmith@mcs.drexel.edu)
Thu, 16 Sep 1999 15:42:32 -0400


've posted to this group before about how my Redhat 6.0 system

goes down every few days with dire error messages (like "Aiee ! system
panic...).

I ran diagnostics on my machine and it passed all tests. At the same
time,

our departmental Sun systems (Ultrasparc servers) slow down to a crawl
--- and it

turned out that some hackers are attacking our systems with pings and

telnets (a packet sniffer disclosed that our high-speed network is

completely saturated by pings, ftp's and telnets from a few sources.

The question is: how do I prevent these attacks from crashing my Linux
system?

(Disconnecting from the network is not an option...). They slow down
Solaris

systems (during the attack itself) but don't kill them off. Our system
adminstrator

said that the Linux kernel is full of race conditions that cause it to
crash under these circumstances...

Is there some way to reconfigure my system to make it less vulnerable?

--
______________________________________________________________________
                                        |
Time blows wildly against my door       | Justin R. Smith
Stirring discarded sorrows              | Department of Mathematics and
Like dead leaves of summers past        |     Computer Science
Memories of forgotten lore              | Drexel University
Making way for new tomorrows            | Philadelphia, PA 19104
New hopes, new fears,                   |
         and new ways that last         | Office: (215) 895-1847
                                        |
c Justin R. Smith, March 14, 1994       | Fax:    (215) 895-1582

My home page: http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~jsmith

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