media Formel4 wrote:
Question is:
- Is it possible with spoofed IP numbers to establish connections to port 80? As far as I know you should get stuck after "SYN". I'm asking that, because tracing back the IPs in question I find very often unrouted areas and non-reachable (but maybe firewalled) IPs.
i would say no (else the school was pretty useless ;-)
- How can I secure this server and/or stop this attack?
this attack is very mean and it succeeds almost always (even if you just do it from a single attacking machine). i would do a search on google, there are definitively others who were under the same sort of attack. just some thoughts about how it could be possible to protect (at least a bit). maybe it's possible to let netfilters connection tracking do the work for you. if you got it installed on your machine just enable it (by writing a simple rule, something like "iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT") and then set the size of the connection table to some small number (check google how to do it). the idea behind it is, that i assume (i didn't try it or investigated in it!!) that the connection tracking will always drop the connection that was the longest non active and so the connections that send something should be kept alive and the "just open" sessions would be dropped. if you set the number to 100 or something, the backend httpd process should be protected (maybe). but take care that connection tracking doesn't lock you out as it is used on all connection (not just the one you write a rule for) good luck markus
Thanks,
Ralf Koch